Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

mcnamarafallacy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 223 posts

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#61

Post by hummusandsushi »

pakitan wrote: post #47
hummusandsushi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The webpage appears to be made to serve as a warning to data-driven businesses to not fall into the same perverse set of incentives that McNamara created, to encourage business managers to diversify their accounts of the success of their business beyond just the quantitative narrative.

I'd be more cynical and suspect this is some kind of elaborate SEO strategy. Submit the site to social networks -> wait till gets some love from the Google algorithm -> put ads on it -> profit.

Possible, but this seems of rather a niche interest for a successful SEO strategy. I could grant that it would then be targeted specifically at the HN sort of social networks.

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#62

Post by Spooky23 »

7thaccount wrote: post #41
peteradio wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a place with a lean 6 sigma certified specialist who towards the end of the companies doom effectively had the lead engineer cleaning out molding machines to track down every last tiny molded part that over the course of several years of continuous running had flung outside of its target. Same guy told me if the coke machine ever stole my change that he'd help me get it back from the vendor.

All the lean sigma stuff seems like another useless management fad to me that only benefits consultants. Is that what you're saying here?

It’s an expression of distrust.

If you ever work in government, procurement people think like that because their goal is objective competitive process that that meets the minimum standard to fulfill the purpose.

There’s a certain logic to it. You don’t want to see random government employees driving around in Teslas, so generally speaking they will be in nondescript 4-door sedans. Having a human say “no” makes them accountable, so a complex process will determine what kind of car you need.

Taken to extreme, it becomes a problem. Procurement officers get lazy and focus on their process instead of the needs of the customer. So they treat humans like Ford Tauruses and allow vendors who understand how to game the process walk out the door with millions.

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#63

Post by serverlessmom »

jancsika wrote: post #32
jscode wrote: post #23

Quick story: I was the CFO for a company that sold to a private equity group (PEG). I took over as the CEO as the founders retired, leaving me to deal with the PEG. It quickly became apparent that the PEG managers looked at everything through the lens of an Excel spreadsheet. These guys were brilliant attorneys and analysts but lacked experience building businesses and managing teams. Ultimately, they couldn’t add mu…

> The moral of the story is that people with analyst mindsets play an essential role in our economy, but sometimes giving those people power over large organizations can have disastrous consequences. I'm gonna cosplay an "analyst mindset": 1. Need to measure costs and benefits of slashing benefits/pay. 2. A benefit-- slashing benefits/pay allows us to hit some obvious financial goal 3. A cost-- Uh oh, I don't yet kno…

I definitely agree with you. I would further argue that the "analyst mentality" has become so engrossed in the foundation of capitalism(and always has been, really) that we see companies across many industries closing down due to the "worker shortage". When in reality the CEO's of the companies complaining the loudest that "no one wants to work" have decided that paying living wages in a deeply competitive job market is less doable than letting the company totally stagnate and dissolve due to lack of people willing to work hard for pennies.

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#64

Post by the_af »

enkid wrote: post #28
dempedempe wrote: post #13

This article is good, but not great - the author only gives one example of how quantitative-only reasoning can be bad (the example of the poppies). The other "example" is just the US military lying. There are also no specific examples of non-quantitative reasoning that, if ignored, would be damaging. I feel like the Wikipedia article does a better job explaining this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy Al…

The example with the US military lying certainly demonstrates another issue with over valuing metrics - making sure you have good data. People who get wrapped around metrics also tend to not look at the data they are being presented. One of the issues McNamara had was he was receiving inflated body count figures. [0] Not only was he measuring the wrong thing, he was measuring it badly. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

It's also a good example of perverse incentives or "gaming the metrics" (in a horrifying way). If the main measure of success was body count, and every kill was considered an enemy by default, this encouraged just killing people and counting them as successes.

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#65

Post by thereddaikon »

7thaccount wrote: post #41
peteradio wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a place with a lean 6 sigma certified specialist who towards the end of the companies doom effectively had the lead engineer cleaning out molding machines to track down every last tiny molded part that over the course of several years of continuous running had flung outside of its target. Same guy told me if the coke machine ever stole my change that he'd help me get it back from the vendor.

All the lean sigma stuff seems like another useless management fad to me that only benefits consultants. Is that what you're saying here?

Like many management system fads, it started as a useful kernel of wisdom or obvious maxim that idiots ran with and turned into a monster. In the case of six sigma, the idea is about constantly optimizing your workflows and not accepting "we've always done it this way" as an excuse.

But most people lack the critical thinking skills to correctly apply wisdom when necessary and instead need a solid framework to operate within. That's how these things inevitably develop. Just like how Agile is supposed to be about getting working code over being bogged down in process but inevitably ends up with with half baked products that have massive issues.

Six Sigma also gets applied to industries it has no business being in. The mentality works best when you have a fixed workflow. In manufacturing it would be if you are making a lot of one thing. You can do a lot of optimizing. But I have seen it employed in organizations where every project was vastly different. Instead of a lean approach it should have, and previously was, following a house of quality philosophy. This happened to be in an industry where cost was rarely a consideration but performance and reliability were.

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#66

Post by asveikau »

paulpauper wrote: post #5

I don't understands what the fallacy is. It is that an overreliance on data can overlook factors not in the data? Why is that a surprise. You would also have to show that not relying on data would generate better results.

> Why is that a surprise

It's surprising to many.

Many people will decide they are "data driven" and act like this gives them infallibility and total correctness. Lots of people need to be told this.

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#67

Post by martincmartin »

Two examples come to mind:

- Investing your money with the fund manager who has the highest returns over the last year, or even 5 years, is called "performance chasing" and generally has worse returns than investing in an index. Think investing in dot com stocks in 1999, and real estate in 2007.

- In Moneyball, about using stats to improve a baseball team, they didn't care how many home runs someone hit. In fact, getting runs that way was considered bad. They wanted to get players on base and them get them home, even if through walks. There's a part of the book where a player is getting a lot of home runs, and therefore increasing the team's score, but the manager doesn't like it. "It's a process", "we have a process" he keeps saying.

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#68

Post by chasd00 »

aeternum wrote: post #2

From a game-theory POV, all wars are caused by misunderstandings / partial information. If each side really knew the true strength of the other side, it would be clear which would win and therefore actual war is illogical and unnecessary.

i'll add that there's a lot of people that see death as the door to paradise and fighting for their cause as the key to that door. No amount of logic or information is going to stop them.

when you're dealing with the mentally ill, all bets are off.

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#69

Post by smaug7 »

eumoria wrote: post #22

McNamara basically admits this himself in the documentary The Fog of War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War It's worth a watch but it's very soft on him and his role. Still a very good documentary.

Was looking for this comment. In McNamara's reflection, a tenant he called out was to understand the enemy. US didn't understand the Viet Congs motivation for fighting the war (freedom from colonizers) whereas the US viewed the war as a larger Cold War. This is the same as what happened in Afghanistan that we didn't learn.

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#70

Post by johnp271 »

Does the McNamara Fallacy have any application to our response to COVID? I often hear pundits of all sorts, medical doctors, epidemiologists, politicians, CDC scientists, etc, make statements such as "the data shows this" and "the data says that" and then follow up with "therefore the science says we must all do such-and-such". I hold a rather narrow, rigorous - maybe closed minded - opinion of what is 'science' (so to me 'social science' is an oxymoron) thus I have a degree of skepticism when data analysis is relied on to heavily for making conclusions that are then called 'scientific'.
Post reply on HN