In the 1960s, MIT professor and meteorologist Edward Lorenz found something strange when he rounded the number .506127 to .506 in a weather modeling program — it shifted weather pattern predictions over the next two months. This decimal change of less than 0.0001 led to his “Butterfly Effect” proffering that a tornado in Texas could be caused by a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil — yes, mentioned in Jurassic Park.
Lorenz taught us that precision matters. Trouble starts when “fake” precision uses exact numbers to emphasize something that cannot be correctly presented in accurate terms. The confusion is when extreme accuracy in reported numbers can be true or misleading — we often cannot know.