Quotes About Measurement

Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted

Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that's counted truly counts

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

Is not a day divided into twenty-four hours, each hour into sixty minutes, and every minute sub-divided into sixty seconds? Now in 86,400 seconds many things can be done.

I think there is a tendency in science to measure what is measurable and to decide that what you cannot measure must be uninteresting.

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

If you define the goal of a society as GNP, that society will do its best to produce GNP. It will not produce welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency unless you define a goal and regularly measure and report the state of welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency.

Don't be stopped by the "if you can't define it and measure it, I don't have to pay attention to it" ploy. No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren't designed to produce them, and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

Pretending that something doesn't exist if it's hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You've already seen the system trap that comes from setting goals around what is easily measured, rather than around what is important. So

If the desired system state is good education, measuring that goal by the amount

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.

complete with carbon-14 signatures

Reality was only rendered when it was observed. Particles were everywhere, until someone peeked, and then they took a discrete location.

The duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom." This is measured by atomic clocks that are accurate to within one second over a period of fifteen billion years—roughly the age of the universe.

If a measurement matters at all, it is because it must have some conceivable effect on decisions and behaviour. If we can't identify a decision that could be affected by a proposed measurement and how it could change those decisions, then the measurement simply has no value

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of science. —Lord Kelvin (1824–1907),

you should start thinking about measurements as a multistep chain of thought. Inferences can be made from highly indirect observations.

Measurement: A quantitatively expressed reduction of uncertainty based on one or more observations.

Understanding how to measure uncertainty is key to measuring risk. Understanding risk in a quantitative sense is key to understanding how to compute the value of information. Understanding the value of information tells us what to measure and about how much effort we should put into measuring it.

Very few experts actually measure their performance over time, and they tend to summarize their memories with anecdotes. They are right sometimes and wrong sometimes, but the anecdotes they remember tend to be more flattering to them.

we need to treat measurement as observations that quantitatively reduce uncertainty.

Definition of Measurement Measurement: A quantitatively expressed reduction of uncertainty based on one or more observations.

For all practical decision-making purposes, we need to treat measurement as observations that quantitatively reduce uncertainty.

Once managers figure out what they mean and why it matters, the issue in question starts to look a lot more measurable.