4 ms·

What's to stop them from just making up numbers?

• tenacious_tuna 3y ago
  this was a plot point of The Wire, where the mayor ran on a campaign of reducing murders. The murder rate dropped--but a zillion other stats came up, because the officers were fudging the classifications of the crimes to try and achieve the metric goal. Fictional, but it makes a poignant point about needing to deeply understand how metrics are collected and recorded to be confident in the conclusions drawn from them.
  • phpisthebest 3y ago
    Like Idiotacracy, I believe the Wire is more Truth than fiction
  • dredmorbius 3y ago
    David Simon discusses this point specifically in a 2008 lecture at UC Berkeley titled "The Audacity of Despair": <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw> The statistics discussion begins at about 8 minutes, and continues for much of the discussion and Q&A. I'd seen that long before watching The Wire itself, and in fact the lecture was a large part of the reason I wanted to watch the series. (Poor quality audio and a very distracting speaking manner. Still very much worth listening to.)
• ComputerGuru 3y ago
  They already do. Entrapment then reclaim they prevented a threat they came up with. Claim on a daily basis that they’ve prevented “hundreds” of 9/11 equivalents and no one presses for proof. Or when a new reporter that doesn’t know the rules does ask for proof, they get “classified for national security reasons.” So, no. Please don’t give me BS charts and graphs to make it easier for fed-apologists to point and play security theater.
  • geodel 3y ago
    Absolutely. Their metrics generating and promoting departments will have field day with this. Endless reports, case studies etc, a whole industry will pop up gorging on tax payer dollars for this "metrics" task.