[arblify]

Your questions are all reasonable. I'm not personally opposed to quantitative decision-making, but I'm also painfully aware of the limitations of quantitative methods, especially when applied under pressure. I would argue that a blind faith in mathematics is just as wrongheaded as the magical thinking you're describing.

To give a clear example of why I'm skeptical, look at the use of quantitative methods to conduct governance in the banking industry. It's not that we shouldn't have used numerical methods, it's just that they ended up being woefully insufficient because of how they were applied. There's no reason we couldn't make the same mistake here in a premature bid for some kind of certainty.

[CPLX]

Yeah but this is like setting monetary policy without using interest rates or something. Or coming up with a government spending program and not even trying to do a quick analysis of how much it will cost. It's fucking insane.

Public policy requires metrics and stated goals, and requires that they not be secret. Without those it's not democracy.

[srikanva]

We're half-aligned. The decision-making process and the data used to inform it should be public, but I don't think we should be saying at this point "when we see these targets hit we will remove these measures." I think our knowledge is still too incomplete to set that target intelligently.