Skip navigation.

Archives

Democracy's Fundamental Flaw

Three Kinds of Measurement and Two Ways to Use Them

In the testing business, we've been wrestling with the measurement problem for quite a while. I think there are two prongs to the problem. The first is the aphorism that "you can't control what you can't measure". The second is the confusion between measurement (which can be either quantitative or qualitative) and /metrics/, which are mathematical functions of measurements, and therefore fundamentally quantitative, /only/ quantitative.