
Ask HN: Whats best scientific princpal tht maybe true tht doesn't get attention? - CerealFounder
Sorry for the weird spelling, I had a character limit
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rawgabbit
I don't know the proper name of this principle but it essentially argues the
opposite of what Statistics says. Statistics argue that the larger the sample
size, the more accurate data we have. To give it a name, I will call it the
"Fog of War" as that is where I see this principle the most. In cases of
military conflicts where you have many layers of bureaucracy, the "Fog of War"
says that quantitative reports (putting events into categories and assigning a
numerical value) results in wildly inaccurate reports and wrong decision
making. Another way of saying this is that "We don't know what we don't know,
so we can't come up with a mathematical set of metrics to measure something we
know little about." Ryan C. Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and former
ambassador to Iraq said this: Our whole notion [is] that we can somehow
develop a mathematical model that includes concrete achievements, factor in a
time frame and voilà. Iraq doesn’t work that way and Afghanistan doesn’t work
that way.

