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Sorry for suddenly appearing on your blog only to disagree with you. I tend not to comment on the parts I agree with, which I know is a fault.

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I blame not the faith in metrics to produce results, but the faith in the Ivy Leagues to produce graduates who are worth hiring as consultants about anything despite having no experience at anything. The great dysfunction here is the religious nature of the Ivy Leagues, which are the cathedrals of crypto-Calvinist puritanism.

The plural of anecdote is not data, because the anecdotes have always been gathered by people trying to prove one point or another. For instance, we have a vast multitude of anecdotes about faith healings, but no data AFAIK.

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Have you seen this article? It broke down those type of people as systemizers, utilitarians, and entropy injectors (chaos inducers).

https://think-boundless.com/dark-side-strategy-consulting/

Also on "impact" vs "replicability" as borderline antonyms in science (thanks Mr. Kirkegaard):

https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/higher-impact-factor-journals-have

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Re. "how much your failure actually meant in material terms requires the sort of counterfactual analysis (“What if everything in the world was the same that day except for the average time to ICU bed?”) that’s extremely difficult to do over aggregated numbers.": This is what partial differential equations were invented to do, and they do it very well, without counterfactuals.

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