And where it's also hard to tell who is doing the work! I'm reminded here of psychics and cold readers. They can easily convince people that they have great mental powers by outputting ambiguous text and letting the consumers of it do most of the work. You'll see similar effects with Meyers Briggs tests and other sorts of business astrology: some people feel like they get a lot of value out of them, but rigorous tests don't back that up.
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I think what you mean is that they work best in cases where it's very hard to measure how well they are working.
And where it's also hard to tell who is doing the work! I'm reminded here of psychics and cold readers. They can easily convince people that they have great mental powers by outputting ambiguous text and letting the consumers of it do most of the work. You'll see similar effects with Meyers Briggs tests and other sorts of business astrology: some people feel like they get a lot of value out of them, but rigorous tests don't back that up.