> I personally would prefer that the jobs numbers apparatus was extremely conservative in the sense that it didn’t overstate the strength of the USA economy.

This sounds like a call for it to be biased low? I'd prefer zero net bias - overstate and understate equally often - and as little error as possible. (Also, I'd like a pet unicorn for the munchkin.)

The problem seems to be around the preliminary numbers and how widely they get reported. Maybe this is a case where excessive transparency and reporting partial data that's known to be inaccurate is negatively useful?

Or maybe there could be some way to get people to accept that it's known to be wrong, and only useful if you have the chops to account for that wrongness in whatever you're using it for? But humans in general seem to mostly be allergic to not knowing things, so...

Maybe the wrongness is predictable enough to model and account for, but publishing "expected correction" numbers along with the preliminary numbers would be extremely un-conservative in that doing that is speaking with your own voice rather than just collecting and reporting data.

Biased low if it must be - a more down-home way of phrasing that is “don’t count your chickens before they hatch,” which, in any case seems like better labor-statistical common sense than the other way around.