their blog.
http://www.straightstatistics.org/article/hospital-mortality-%E2%80%93-genie-out-bottle
Essentially the results from different ways of working with numbers and
applying them to the qualities of a hospital come out with widely
different results. There's no system that's agreed to be robust and
provides a statistically accurate and reliable picture but they're used
anyway. The site has been involved in criticising the national measures
and from the author's conclusion it seems the Department of Health have
moved swiftly into action and....renamed them.
The application of scientific techniques in early sciences is usually
pretty poor. Measures have always been important but they're getting
more and more common. More people expect to see numbers and graphs, then
use them to make decisions or campaign for change. But these techniques
have a long way to go before they become anything akin to the accuracy
and predictable usefulness of these methods in advanced sciences where
these techniques have been used for millennia..
Sadly people still treat numbers and measures of soft quantities with
the same trust as they put in a car speedometer. Currently measures
outside the physical sciences often and at best can be used to
guesstimate stopped, going forward, going forward really fast and going
backwards. They haven't developed the accuracy to really use numbers
like 0, 15, 50 and -15 miles an hour. They also don't predict yet either
though they're somewhat better than sacrificing a chicken to the gods
and looking at its entrails.
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