[HN Gopher] Goodhart's Law and how systems are shaped by the met... ___________________________________________________________________ Goodhart's Law and how systems are shaped by the metrics you chase Author : neonate Score : 43 points Date : 2020-07-07 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (whyisthisinteresting.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (whyisthisinteresting.substack.com) | cs702 wrote: | Short, well-written, and interesting. | | One question that popped in my mind as I was reading this was, | how about alpha, correlation, and volatility in financial | markets? Has the behavior of markets changed over time as alpha, | correlation, and volatility have become dominant metrics to be | chased? | aaron695 wrote: | I personally don't believe Goodhart's Law overpowers the benefit | of the metric, ever. | | It's a quaint factoid, but just as the soviets would just execute | a factory manage gaming the system for producing pins or spikes, | people will see you at some level gaming the system and call you | on it. (and make a TV show like The Wire) | | Just like other factoids (ie Risk compensation), the effects will | be real, but the factoid is so misused at extreme interpretations | the factoids do more harm the good. | mannanj wrote: | Instead of downvoting you I thought I'd ask, how likely do you | think people do see you gaming and don't call you on it? I've | been in many more situations where you don't have the power or | ability to call someone out on something because it's more | complicated than just "I'll tell on you". | majormajor wrote: | If everybody's gaming something a little bit, nobody is | incentivized to take action on most things, even if someone | reports it. | | It often takes egregious abuses to get people to care. | | (And is this so bad? The end result of "perfectly efficient" | is pretty brutal for the individual worker.) | ChainOfFools wrote: | What gets measured gets treasured. | | alternate form: The uncountable is of no account | amelius wrote: | We need to rate the performance of our economy not by how much we | produce, but by how little. | choward wrote: | A better metric would be something related to happiness. If we | produce less and and GDP goes down but everyone is happier then | who cares? | Mirioron wrote: | There are many ways happiness can be manipulated though. | People tend to be happy when things are improving. The most | obvious way to manipulate this metric is to deliberately hit | rock bottom and then slowly improve from there. | | Another problem is drugs. It's possible to manipulate | people's happiness rather explicitly with that. | | Edit: these are out there examples, but here's a more | realistic one: borrow money from future generations. Set up a | system that will eventually fail, but provide a lot of | benefits/happiness in the present. When the long-term | consequences arrive politics have already changed. | sideshowb wrote: | Funny enough I recently published something on wellbeing as a | metric. Goodhart gets a mention... | https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/8/3180 | alentist wrote: | Somalia, Congo, and North Korea produce very little. Is this | what you had in mind? If not, could you clarify? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-07-07 23:00 UTC)