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Tim Harford

“It could not. Sometimes you have to be there to understand—especially when a situation is fast-moving or contains soft, hard-to-quantify details, as is typically the case on the battlefield. The Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek had a phrase for the kind of awareness that is hard to capture in metrics and maps: the “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.” Social scientists have long understood that statistical metrics are at their most pernicious when they are being used to control the world, rather than try to understand it. Economists tend to cite their colleague Charles Goodhart, who wrote in 1975: “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.”[12] (Or, more pithily: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”) Psychologists turn to Donald T. Campbell, who around the same time explained: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”[13]”

Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
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The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford
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