Thread by @DellAnnaLuca

WITTGENSTEIN’S RULER, P2

A Nobel prize can tell us two things: how good is the recipient or how bad is the committee.

“Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.” – @nntaleb

2/ I used to express Wittgenstein’s ruler as follows: the more the free parameters, the less you know what is being measured.

For example, last spring COVID mortality could have been informing us about how aggressive is the virus or how good is a country’s testing

3/ In addition, and this is the point of this new thread, it just dawned to me that Wittgenstein’s ruler is not just about the precision of the ruler but also about its choice.

4/ For example, centralization tends to result in the choice of metrics that, regardless of their precision, only measure some of the results that matter to the general population, resulting in effects such as “centralization is only efficient to the central observer”

5/ This because the central observer is the one that chooses the ruler, ie the metrics to measure.

6/ I used to intend “ruler’s reliability” as simply a matter of precision/variance; instead it’s also a matter of choice of the ruler and metrics used to conduct the measurement.

Do they reliably help estimating the purpose of the measurement, or do they estimate something else?

7/ I just wanted to highlight this second component of Wittgenstein’s ruler - we can use it even before the measurement is conducted, using the choice of the ruler to deduce properties of the measurer.