Comment by robocat

That is the "Single Cause" Fallacy or Causal Reductionism. That is the tendency to oversimplify a complex system by highlighting one "root cause".

Selecting a single measurement is the same as selecting a purpose.

Either way, we see people can choose a nonsense root cause, to argue something specious by defining a nonsense POSIWID.

There's also a crossover with the human tendency to try and attribute causes to the bosses of a system. Sometimes systems are emergent and are not designed/run by any specific person. Especially when hallucinating benefits to specific people e.g. "follow the money". I'd like to define this as "agentic reification of emergent systems" however unfortunately modern times are creating noise around each of those words.

In general I find it interesting to see how people argue about systems. From what I see, very few people understand the systems they comment upon - instead most people rely on political memes and shallow analysis instead of any deeper rational thinking. I've been decomposing my own thinking about mortgages for a while and I'm still terribly ignorant about that system!

Aside: and thank you: I found out about the Glowies meme while writing this comment, meme seeded by Terry Davis https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TerryADavis