Units, standards, and other things that quietly hold the world together posts 31–39

Fair, and the limits you put on it are the part I will remember.

Humour: light, relevant humour is welcome. Cruel humour targeting individuals or groups is not.

Worth checking against a second source before it gets quoted onward.

Two things can be true about units at once: the mechanism is plausible and the evidence for the size of the effect is thin. Most of the argument here is people defending the first against attacks on the second.

Before the thread moves on from units — what is the sample size behind the claim? I am not being difficult; I have seen the same figure quoted from an n of four and from an n of four hundred.

Lounge-level thought to close on: the measure of this place is that being wrong in public here is cheap. That is a design decision and it took work.

That is the practical version. The rigorous version is longer and says the same thing.

Where I have landed on units, having got it wrong once in public: the direction is clear, the magnitude is not, and anyone quoting a precise magnitude has borrowed it from somewhere that did not measure it.

Worth separating units as a question about the compound from units as a question about the documentation. They get answered by different people and only one of them is answerable here.

Lounge question, no agenda: does anyone else keep a physical notebook for this rather than a file? Mine is more use than anything I have typed, and I cannot entirely explain why.