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Metrics Mania and the Countless Counting Problem
mobkarma writes "Einstein once said, 'Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.' A New York Times article suggests that unless we know how things are counted, we don't know if it's wise to count on the numbers. The problem isn't with statistical tests themselves, but with what we do before and after we run them. If a person starts drinking day in and day out after a cancer diagnosis and dies from acute cirrhosis, did he kill himself? The answers to such questions significantly affect the count."
If you really want to blame anyone, blame the handset manufacturers determined to ram button-free plastic slabs down everyone's throats. It's one thing to hold a phone in one hand and navigate its keypad with your thumb by touch, maybe stealing a quick glance at the display for a fraction of a second once or twice in a minute. It's another matter entirely to try interacting with a tiny button-free plastic brick that somehow manages to ignore your intentional gestures, yet instantly reacts to even the tiniest accidental contact... usually, in ways that are even harder to abort once triggered(*). The real hazards aren't the people with their thumb over the keypad ready to press '1' for English, and '4' to delete the message... it's the people forced to take BOTH HANDS off the wheel and devote their full visual attention to the picture of a keypad so they can interact with their phone in even the most trivial way.
(*)You know... it's 3am, somehow someone's number gets activated in the phone app, and you accidentally touch the 'send' key. At that point, you can hit 'end' like a madman, hold it down, or do just about anything short of yanking out the battery, and it won't matter... the call will go through 2-3 seconds later, and they'll be mad at you for waking them up. It's not that the call physically can't be aborted... it's that the UI designers never bothered to accommodate the use case of an accidental call-initiation, so once you trigger the call, the UI just goes into a busy-wait until the attempt either succeeds or fails. I know, because 10 years ago, you COULD hit 'end' immediately after hitting 'send', and it worked. This specific problem emerged with the first PalmOS phones, became enormously worse under Windows Mobile, and has stayed equally bad under both Android and iPhone. It's a problem that's almost uniquely endemic to phones with "Glass UIs" that exists even on phones with hardkeys for send/end, and just gets even worse on phones with virtual send/end keys. OK, it might just be a "Sprint" thing, but I've heard enough complaints from others to believe it's really just a fundamental flaw in the way modern phone user interfaces are designed to work.
Then you'll really enjoy Gary Taubes -> he was David in the Lion's den during his lecture, and was the most anti-Berkeley thing you could imagine coming out of there :)