Shankar Sivarajan comments on What’s a good methodology for “is Trump unusual about executive overreach /​ institution erosion /​ corruption?”

[Shankar Sivarajan]

doesn’t have direct metrics, so we have to come up with proxies of some kind.

See also: McNamara procedure

the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can’t easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist.