While likely a false fig leaf of deception, I like to pretend I often seek to find the limitations of limited *arguments*.
What metric a person chooses to value certainly varies a great deal, but when a metric is offered as a de facto conclusion to a hypothesis, it would seem incumbent on one to exhaustively validate the applicability and reliability of the metric.
It is as if the process of measurement alone is sufficient with only a hasty glance towards whether what is being measured relates well to what one is ultimately seeking to determine.
I have (no kidding) broken bread with 7 Nobel Prize winners (3 didn’t have the plaque just yet), a president of the US National Academy of Sciences, a Director of the NIH, … it’s a rather remarkable bunch. In some cases I was as a fly at the table, in others actively engaged. It seems there were two things that were consistent.
First, while recognition goes to fancy notions of how and why, 99% of the consideration and focus of these folks was in determining as precisely as possible what “is”. Whatever one determines “is” will always be to some degree in error, every step after that only adds error, and in the end you end up with guano unless the starting point was pretty spot on.
Second, be one big or small, dim or bright, these folks were voracious harvesters of the ideas, notions, facts, and observations of others … but in the opposite order.
It brings to mind Heinlein’s Fair Witness, and these folks were remarkably adept as saying ‘you mean the side you saw, right?, …. the side of the house *you saw* was white?’.
It’s a pretty easy trap to fall into, and indeed such assumptions are likely very often useful given how successful humans are, and how often they do it.
Not quite sure what in your comments brought these musings on, but there it is.
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