The New York Times pricks the readers' eyes again with his needle. A small digital gauge, like the one that tells you your boiler or nuclear power plant is about to explode, “estimates the outcome of the race in real time based on polling data,” as it says Just gets to the point. As we write this, the needle pierces the red “Likely” side of the gauge, indicating the decision is “Likely Trump.” To confirm this qualitative assessment, the needle makes it clear, again as we write this, that Donald Trump has an 88 percent chance of winning. This is good to know or bad, depending on your preferences.

The Just is of course not the only one offering up-to-the-minute assessments. On television, newscasters talk endlessly about all or nothing, reporting live from Nevada or North Carolina. On CNN.com, the network's familiar election map also offers live results, in an interface that has become so confusing that one of us couldn't figure out how to opt out of the Georgia results after zooming in. The whole matter is intended to provide updates, a result that is completely beyond our control. At some point, probably not tonight and maybe not tomorrow, we will know who won the presidential race — and all the other contests and ballot initiatives at the federal and state levels and the like.

There is no longer a good way to consume election night information, if there ever was one. Cable news is the loud, stressful, touchscreen-based option for those looking for the dopamine of a harmless key race alert. Social media is the best option if you want all of that, but updated every second, with comments from Nazis and people who have made big crypto bets on the outcome. Processing data from more than 100,000 voting precincts in a country spanning six time zones and more than 161 million registered voters is a glorious achievement. However, the process is not conducive to the human need to actually know things. In a sense, the needle is the ChatGPT aggregation of the toxic sludge output and the resulting useful information. It is the supposed signal in the noise. But it could also just be noise itself… until it isn't.

We've been chuckling for a while now at a joke on X about “creating dashboards to give executives deeper insights into key business functions.” (At least we think they're jokes.) What would you do if you were a giant? Kaiju the city attacked? Ensure dashboards provide actionable insights into key business functions. What are you doing in your 30s? Get married, start a business, or… create dashboards to provide actionable insights. You get the picture.

The jokes are funny because they imply a terrible everyday business thing called “business intelligence dashboards.” Big data, data science, data-driven decision making and a variety of related business topics say that you, me, he, she, all You should collect as much data as possible about everything and then use that data to make decisions. But this is hard, so it should be done easily. So the dashboards. Like a car's speedometer, but scaled to any level of complexity, a dashboard provides simple, quick, at-a-glance “insights” into the endless silos of data and makes them “actionable.” That's a contradiction – hence the jokes.

That's how it is with this one Just Prediction needle (and the CNN map and everything else). Elections are becoming increasingly uncertain because they are always so close; because the survey is difficult or interrupted; because disinformation, confusion, oppression or God knows what else has made it impossible to have any idea in advance how these contests might turn out. The promise of summarizing all of this uncertainty and turning it into knowledge shortly after polls close in a state is too tempting to ignore. So tune in to the news. They refresh the needle.

But what you learn is nothing more than how you can feel good or bad at the moment. That the needle has clearly caused many extremely online coastal elites to suffer from a mild form of PTSD is clearly a feature, not a bug. It is a reminder of the power of the needle, or, perhaps more accurately, of its ability to move in such a way that it appears to initiate its own reality (when in reality it only reflects changes in a table of information). The needle is manipulative.

The worst part is that nothing about it is “actionable,” as the Business Insights Dashboard fanatics would say. Dashboards promise a minimum level of control. But what are you going to do now that the polls are closed and you're in your pajamas? Cheer, or bite your nails, or try to lure your spouse away from the TV or the needle, or eat cake, or drink alcohol, or stare into space, or high-five, or clean up after you have excited. There's nothing you can do. It's out of your hands, and no amount of data, no survey, no boss analysis, or anything else can change it. You know this and you still stare.