I found your post interesting, but I had nothing to contribute so I didn't respond with any IRS story of my own. So my point was, even though there was not an initial big response to your thread did not mean people weren't reading and finding it interesting.
I wonder if I can download stats to see if my threads are within an acceptable range of... μTR²: Mean/Median/Mode of Time to Receive Replies μΣR: Mean/Median/Mode of Total Replies ΣGL/ΣOL: Total Genuine Likes/Total Obligatory Likes (I can tell the difference) ΣR²M: Total Responses Relative to Membership, expressed as a rolling average over time I'll have to determine an adjustment factor for lesser activity around the holidays (being a global forum, this part is gonna take some work. Does anyone recall where Bastille Day falls?) I hope my ego can take it. Maybe I don't want to know...
I have too much dignity (or trust) to inquire of my reputation, so I thought perhaps some data-based analysis might be in order. Besides, if I find the results displeasing, I'll just tweak the formulas until I get the results I want. I built an entire career on doing just that.
Nope. Nor can I find it with a quick web search. Amazon does not offer it. I do know I've received the command "Make the numbers work" more than once in my career. I've often wondered that if such things are the reality of American corporations, how bad off are other nations if we are the leaders?
I cannot find the book either. I have only seen it for sale once at a B. Dalton's in Anchorage. It was over $50 and I wouldn't pay that for it. It was written by a father-daughter team who were both statisticians who started out calculating pollution generated form mine runoff. From their contacts, they discovered that much of what the government published was just as you said: the goal was determined, then the numbers were generated to deliver that result. The one that I recall from listening to an interview with them was the number of people who die annually form second-hand smoke. They said the EPA came up with a number of people who they wanted to die from second-hand smoke, then hired math people to come up with a formula that would deliver that number. Perhaps that is why the book is not available. Perhaps they were pressured to remove it from shelves as it pulled back the veil on a lot of government nonsense. We have seen a good bit of that during the Covid stuff.