McNamara Fallacy
Properties
- logseq-entity
- Logseq/Entity/Named Law
McNamara Fallacy
- Statement: relying only on what is easily measured while ignoring important factors that are hard to measure—and treating the unmeasured as unimportant.
- Origin: named for Robert McNamara and the use of body counts as a metric of progress during the Vietnam War.
- Kind: named fallacy.
- Example: judging a war's progress by enemy body count while ignoring whether the strategy was working.
See also
- Goodhart's Law — what happens once the easy measure becomes the target.
- Epistemics/Concept/Heuristic vs Axiom