Reading your excellent comment I remembered this comment from a few days ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=19206174 https://news.ycombinator.com/repl

Reading your excellent comment I remembered this comment from a few days ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=19206174 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=19206174 Increasingly I think that there are many things that measurement simply doesn't apply to. That our industrial and post industrial society has conditioned us to believe that the applicability of statistics to complex but still mass produced items can be extended to humans and social situations in a simple way. But actually, it can't. Humans are all very different, calculus's of human affairs must deal with penalty functions full of infinities of loss.