HOW METRICS / COUNTING NUMBERS / SYSTEMS OF MEASUREMENT FAIL HUMANS

(ALMOST HIDING DATA / PARTIALLY REVEALING)

YouTube views as an example here.

YouTube counts how many people viewed a video or is it just counting the video's visits to the page? It's maybe unclear so this is part of a problem / question

- did they actually watch any of the video?
- did they just open and close tab?
- was it most likely a fly-by / mistake?

These would all drastically discount the page visit or video watching number.

So to conclude the number is nice for a number count- but what it's counting (all the uses) IS NOT... showing for metrics to be worth you really need lots more metrics else it's misleading... (which opens up doors to manipulation / scams / misleading numbers)
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SUMMARY
So imagine metrics were clearer and showed
- the visits where someone open closed within 30secs
- video watched %'s (like did they watch only from middle to end and not start?

Arguably this is more of a page hit counter* and while it might not suggest it's a 'video watched' counter you can see there is responsibility ON BOTH SIDES to consider what the conditions and cases to increment pages are -
- and could mean far less YouTube numbers from people clicking this video instead of that.. or looking for a particular version of a video for "Gangsta's Paradise" or anything with many versions- you might click all fo them and +1 many pages without actually watching !

So unless there is further clever metrics (perhaps even clever metrics for socially important data) then it's misleading and doesn't show if people stuck around more than 10seconds /
how long user watched for and what we as users could check to answer "how many people watched 80% consistently?")

Instead we just have numbers which almost hide these metrics and this is the danger if it's money, politics or anything measured but doesn't measure the cases or conditions (and even doesn't want to by those funneling stats deliberately only in some semi-transparent ways like this youtube example where 100% FOR SURE every video has a BIG dropout count but still counts as 'viewed' or 'seen' or 'watched' when it's TOTALLY NOT)
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CONCLUSION
-Numbers are misleading and while it depends how serious you are it means metrics can be taken less seriously,
-Metrics often demands FULL ACCESS OR TRANSPARENCY or some infinite sub-measurements in order to be seen properly from different angles and filters (and which would probably defeat the whole reasoning why to measure). Even if YouTube was a bit clever and waiting to see if user was still watching after 30seconds then you get into "what constitutes watching properly a video, 50%, 80%, 100%?)
- For humans our brain sometimes does better to reason things ourselves so for YouTube video "who cares" if 20% of the video counter is NOT from proper views- but for life these numbers obviously count much more!

A combination is probably best but I feel it's way more manipulation by industry and bosses to look at numbers and not reality of sub cases and a kind of fascism to not care or only care for number / order / standards / progress etc.