The joke is that the employee fails to understand the scientist's implication of the uncertainty in the age of the fossil and uses false precision.

This is also an example of false precision, which is artificial precision specifically of numerical quantities or measures.

For instance, if a device measures to the nearest gram and gives a reading of 12.345 kg, it would create false precision to express this measurement as 12.34500 kg.

Rounding to a fixed number of decimal places in this way is an orthographic convention that does not maintain significance, and may either lose information or create false precision.

We don't want to insert some kind of false precision in this.

Correlated errors can lead to false precision and p-values that are too small.

A slide rule tends to moderate the fallacy of "false precision" and significance.

The ships were glossy with false precision.

The precision claimed for a meta-analysis, he said, "can often be a false precision."

These figures, while interesting, may represent a false precision in a market where landlords are said to be increasingly aggressive in marketing space and tenants are looking for deals.