Recently, I was talking about calibration (here and here), and how it should be more than just identifying the most likely cause of the output of a measuring instrument. The calibration process should strive to characterize the range of true conditions that might produce such an output, along with any major asymmetries (bias) in the relationship between the truth and the instrument's reading. In short, we need to identify all the major characteristics of the probability distribution over states of the world, given the condition of our measuring device.
Failure to go beyond simply identifying each possible instrument reading with a single most probable cause is a special case of a very general problem that in my opinion plagues scientific practice. Such a major failure mode should have a special name, so lets call it 'pass / fail mentality.' It is the most extreme possible form of a fallacy known as spurious precision, and involves needlessly throwing away information.
