Someone with poor reading comprehension will read this as "trusting the data over a more holistic approach", when the actual criticism would be something like "making decisions based on metrics than can be easily measured, rather than ALL metrics is a mistake".
Generally speaking, if you have comprehensive and complete data and domain competence, it is not a mistake to make a decision based on objective metrics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
Plenty of games with complete information. Here's a famous one.
Getting a good overview of what happens at scale is exceedingly hard, and on pretty much all of this you need to take in more inputs than what can be strictly quantified.
I knew someone would come along and move the goalposts.
Why don't you provide an example then? Or you come up with an example where having additional and relevant data is explicitly _worse_ for the outcome.
No one in this entire thread claimed that having more data is bad. This is also not what the fallacy is about and no one is against having good quantifiable data.
Incorrect! I don't know either of you, but let's play fairly.
The other person was asked if they ever had complete information, then they provided an example. Then the goalposts were moved to not only "real world situation," but "non-trivial."
It's possible to deem any real-world situation they offered in return with complete information to be "trivial," thus moving the goalposts again.
You measure what you can, that moves you forward.
"US Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale reportedly told McNamara, who was trying to develop a list of metrics to allow him to scientifically follow the progress of the war, that he was not considering the feelings of the common rural Vietnamese people. McNamara wrote it down on his list in pencil, then erased it and told Lansdale that he could not measure it, so it must not be important."