There is an art (and a science) to numerical precision that seems lost in software, writing and conversation. The trick to appropriate precision is understanding accuracy. This all falls under the banner of numeracy.
For example, I just received a confirmation of a cinema booking that gave the time of the film in HH:MM:SS format. The site lists programme times in HH:MM. They normally start trailers within a few minutes of the advertised time. To list seconds is an innumerate and false promise.
I sometimes receive notifications that I can expect a delivery in a 2-hour window such as "between 12:07 and 14:07".
To quote to the minute shows a failure of understanding of what an approximate range is, as well traffic and logistics.
It's a 2-hour window of imprecision. Quoting to the minute shows a deep lack of understanding. Quoting to 5-minute intervals is just about acceptable. To 10- or 15-minute is more appropriate significance. But honestly, in this case, to the hour is just fine.
In such cases, it makes the company and the software authors look incompetent and clueless about their own domain, whereas they should present the exact opposite.
This doesn't mean that your plan or your calculations don't contain such precision, but there is an art to presentation logic and UX that has been developed over many decades — as well as experimental science and metrology over centuries — that often seems thrown out the window when it comes to presenting something in a window.
I still remember a moment about 10 years ago (note that I say "about 10 years ago" and not "about 3652 days ago") when a project manager showed me a plan that showed me progress on a task that had been estimated at around 2 months.
"We're 52.5% complete on this task," she told me.
That many significant figures on something as woolly as progress on an estimated multi-person task is just noise.
"There *is* a chance you might be about half done, but even that's optimistic," I said.
You also see it when people are switching between units. For example, a journalist asking Google for a unit conversion on an approximate figure in one system of measurement into another.
"The car went another two kilometers (1.243 miles) before it was stopped by the police."
"He was said to be about 6 feet (182.88 cm) tall."
Such numerical solecisms are all the more ironic in outlets that claim they value accuracy in their reporting.
Kevlin Henney
Kevin P. Fleming