If every study on depression would use it’s own metric for depression that’s optimal for the specific study it would be hard to learn from the studies and aggregate information from them. It’s much better when you have a metric that has consistency.
Consistent measurements allow reacting to how a metric changes over time which is often very useful for evaluating interventions.
This is true, but it doesn’t fit well with the given example of “When will [country] develop the nuclear bomb?”. The problem isn’t that people can’t agree what “nuclear bomb” means or who already has them. The problem is that people are working from different priors and extrapolating them in different ways.
If every study on depression would use it’s own metric for depression that’s optimal for the specific study it would be hard to learn from the studies and aggregate information from them. It’s much better when you have a metric that has consistency.
Consistent measurements allow reacting to how a metric changes over time which is often very useful for evaluating interventions.
This is true, but it doesn’t fit well with the given example of “When will [country] develop the nuclear bomb?”. The problem isn’t that people can’t agree what “nuclear bomb” means or who already has them. The problem is that people are working from different priors and extrapolating them in different ways.