burnafter187

Thinking about it, in the instance of important but esoteric metrics, do you think that the most frequent case has to do with the [expected] ability to impact or exploit it meaningfully? I don't do a lot of work with numbers, but it seems to me that in terms of affectation, those dumb statistics are the low hanging fruit with low investment cost in terms of manipulation, thus yielding "better" results and isolating them to the use case while alienating the complex metrics. It's a lot easier to take a metric that isn't contextually affected than the obverse, and up/downregulate it.

I think my example would be the quasi-metric of the single-sample workup you'd get at a hospital. You get a single datapoint. Compare that to a longer term study where samples are taken at 4 hour intervals. The latter brings up a lot of subsequent questions and has a lot of interconnections with the world at large and the individual's biological characteristics. E.g. getting caught by a train 2/5 days, boosting cortisol and norepinephrine, or low receptor affinity for X, thus producing the illusion of high X levels. As you modify you also complicate with an increasingly large list of rules. Or you just write a script for statins and pat Tom on the ass, noting next visit that serum cholesterol is down.

I think that's wrong though. Hypothetically you could have a vaccine engineered alongside the virus and deploy it in secret, or at least using some mode of obfuscation. Not that it would be simple, and not that it wouldn't leak, but it's not an impossible scenario to have a country immunized, I don't reckon.

I mean, look at COVID response, Russia and China both have their own vaccines, what's to prevent them from sliding in something extra to prevent another disease which has been engineered?