How important is accuracy?

Seth Godin writes,

Should you visit a college before you decide to go there?

Well, a one-hour personal visit is certainly visceral and emotional and it feels real. But it's also based on the weather, on the route you took to school, on the few people you met or the one class you visited.

None of this is correlated to what the four-year experience is actually like, or what the degree or experience is worth over the lifetime of a career.

By analogy, everything from how angry that last customer was on the phone to precisely how many degrees it is outside right now are not nearly as accurate indicators as we make them out to be.

You don't need an electron microscope to figure out if a ball is round. (In fact, it will almost certainly tell you something less than useful.)*

Too much resolution stops giving you information and becomes merely noise, which actually gets in the way of the accuracy you seek.

*[If you were able to shrink the Earth to the size of a billiard ball, it would be the smoothest sphere ever created. Hard to believe this if you live near the edge of the Grand Canyon.]