Ask HN: Whats best scientific princpal tht maybe true tht doesn't get attention?
Sorry for the weird spelling, I had a character limit
1 comments
I don't know the proper name of this principle but it essentially argues the opposite of what Statistics says. Statistics argue that the larger the sample size, the more accurate data we have. To give it a name, I will call it the "Fog of War" as that is where I see this principle the most. In cases of military conflicts where you have many layers of bureaucracy, the "Fog of War" says that quantitative reports (putting events into categories and assigning a numerical value) results in wildly inaccurate reports and wrong decision making. Another way of saying this is that "We don't know what we don't know, so we can't come up with a mathematical set of metrics to measure something we know little about." Ryan C. Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and former ambassador to Iraq said this: Our whole notion [is] that we can somehow develop a mathematical model that includes concrete achievements, factor in a time frame and voilà. Iraq doesn’t work that way and Afghanistan doesn’t work that way.