Let's suppose that Boris has just told us that 2,745,123 people have been vaccinated in the first half of January... we've got to ask ourselves ... is it true ? We're bound to be impressed that they've been recorded to the very last one. But..but... as he spoke those very words, they were probably already out of date. It looks very accurate . Suspiciously so. Right down to that final 23 ! Think of all the ways that might not be a very reliable fact. Because it's actually reliability that we need first and foremost. But that 2,745,123 could be unreliable in so many ways. For a start, there's results from thousands of separate NHS workers, GPs surgeries, Village Halls etc. And then sent to some central office that sticks them all together. And at every stage of all that, data can get lost, mis-typed, recorded twice or not at all. Oh dear oh dear. .... oh dear. Accuracy is no use if it ain't reliable. It's no use memorising pi as 3.14325662681129 ... it looks so so accurate. But it is WRONG. Let's put it in an ornithological setting now ... Old Bob tells me that he counted 8347 Canada Geese in the Old Plague Burial Field. Just think of all the things that could lead to that count being way out. For a start, Bob is indeed old, and he's shrunk to only 5' 2" , and his eyesight is dubious to say the least, as is his attention span and memory. And the hedge is 4' 11" tall ! So ... there's geese hidden by other geese, there's geese feeding with their heads and necks out of sight at the moment he's looking, some geese are flying off and some arriving, there's Old Bob forgetting where he's up to and making it up ... plus he's only using his crap ex-world-war-one bins. He's got a scope, but he can't carry it more than a few metres. But Old Bob has got his 8347 total , which gets into the yearly bird report, and is probably way off the mark. Had he been a bit more aware of all those issues, he might have been more cautious and rounded that figure to, say, 8000+, or 8-9000, and not a ridiculously "accurate" 8347, which is lacking any "reliability" at all. But it looks so temptingly "accurate." There we are then, in a world of uncertainty, unreliability and spurious accuracy. Our only consolation is ..it was ever thus. Vielleicht, alles ist Kaputt !
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AuthorThat's the author up there ... I was young and sprightly then. Archives
October 2022
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