The meaning(lessness) of a number

Numbers can misinform as well as inform — even if they are correct, because they do not (and cannot) carry sometimes crucial context

For many years, the product evaluations of consumer magazines like Which? in the UK, and countless equivalents in other countries, have been identifying “Best Buys”: the products that performed best in the tests. But such a binary distinction (a product either is, or is not, a Best Buy) is not necessarily very helpful.

One issue with it is that it doesn’t tell us whether a product that failed to receive the coveted badge only just failed to make the grade, or whether it was mediocre across the board. Another concern is that the boundary between Best and Not-Best is arbitrary, and a further one is that the rating inevitably has to combine many criteria. For, say, a dishwasher, perhaps the energy consumption, the duration of a cycle, the noise level, the ease of loading and unloading, and the capacity would be meaningful yardsticks along which to compare different models. But what relative weight do each of these criteria receive in the overall evaluation? And does this reflect how we personally would approach the performance of the appliance?