With lots of data there's no doubt that they are measuring something, but it's not clear that they are measuring what they want. Your breakfast analogy would b

With lots of data there's no doubt that they are measuring something, but it's not clear that they are measuring what they want. Your breakfast analogy would be more like: - Some days Alice eats crumpets while sitting in her house and it takes her about 20 minutes. - Some days Bob eats a bagel while on the way to work and it takes him about 5 minutes. - Therefore, bagels are 4 times faster to eat than crumpets. See the problem is we have conflated lots of correlations at once. There is 1) a tendency for certain types of foods (languages) to be used for certain purposes, and a tendency for certain kinds of people to prefer certain foods (languages), and neither of those correlations are necessarily caused by the properties of the food (language) itself.