Friday, October 30, 2009

I Saved 10 Lives On My Way to Work Today

This article in the Washington Post "White House: 650,000 jobs saved, created by stimulus" almost made me audibly laugh as I read the title. It really is brilliant to use a great-sounding-but-immeasurable statistic as the golden standard for progress.

I think this point it well described in this Wall Street Journal article back in June, "The Media Fall for Phony 'Jobs' Claims."

1 comment:

Lisa C said...

You should start writing stuff like this on grant proposals.

"With this imaging system I will image, or try to image, new *insert fancy talk* things"

or even more on point

"although the STED effect has not been seen with this setup, it is there, it's just not measurable"

I'm pretty sure they'll trust you. On a scale of Korean stem cell researcher to President Obama, I think you're more toward the Obama side of "trustworthy enough to believe even if it seems shady"