Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal – Metrics

Article note: This uh... this isn't just a thing in social science, though I'll grant that it's worst there. Figuring out which methods are entrenched for sound reasons vs. stupid reasons is often incredibly difficult, especially since you get countervailing noise from lovely phenomena like "They stumbled upon an incredibly excellent heuristic that empirically outperforms the later more rigorous and grounded methods" or "The name associated with it was a distasteful old European dude, so a certain portion of the discipline are reflexively opposed to it and prefer a similar method that doesn't allow for direct comparison."