Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

How Measurement Fails Doctors and Teachers • 2016 Jan 16 • Robert M. Wachter • New York Times

“The secret of quality is love” — Professor Avedis Donabedian, University of Michigan School of Public Health

Measurement is necessary and inevitable but often times there’s not enough inquiry as to whether a measurement is statistically let alone scientifically valid.

Measuring a whole bunch of numbers without at least having a working theory of what those numbers are supposed to represent—what they mean in the big picture—is simply bad science.

(crossposted on Facebook)