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The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

mcnamarafallacy.com

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Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#101

Post by [deleted] »

missedthecue wrote: post #78
sandworm101 wrote: post #60

What is the name for the fallacy of thinking that wars are always meant to be won? Throughout history wars have been fought without any intention of "winning". Sometimes a war can serve a religious or ceremonial purpose, one that doesn't require a clear winner. Other wars have been fought for completely economic reasons. Others are proxy contests whereby greater powers can demonstrate their abilities without directly…

Wars might have unclear objectives and mission-creep, but I don't think anyone is fighting to lose.

[deleted]

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#102

Post by missedthecue »

serial_dev wrote: post #88
missedthecue wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wars might have unclear objectives and mission-creep, but I don't think anyone is fighting to lose.

The question is about what "winning" means for the people who start wars and keep fighting them. It might not be the same as for you. To quote Julian Assange, "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war".

I just don't buy that line of thinking at all. If that is truly their goal, there are way easier and subtle ways to do it without causing a collapse in political capital for the parties and politicians involved, which the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars did.

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#103

Post by calyth2018 »

p_l wrote: post #97
johnp271 wrote: post #70

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…

More like the data about COVID is used as fig leaf for metrics in other areas actually driving the decisions, or ideology/dogma. If you go with hard data and experience, you'd do hard moves like China (and many other asian countries did). In fact, similar moves have been done in the past in Europe (on the communist side of Iron Curtain) to stop epidemics, including even manual contact tracing. But because a non-trivi…

> because of dogma like disbelief in aerosol transmission

It's not just that COVID can spread via aerosol. It's more so that the western world extrapolated the definition via a study on TB, neglecting that TB needed to infect deep in the lungs.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

There is a scientific paper version of this, btw.

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#104

Post by topspin »

shellback3 wrote: post #83

McNamara cut his teeth on real world problems in the AAF's Office of Statistics and worked with General Curtis LaMay to plan how best to use the B29 bombers. He became an expert with statistics and other math tools and thought they could be widely applied to business and, of course, war. Once he had these marvelous tools he found nails everywhere. For instance the rate of German tank production was accurately estimat…

> Once he had these marvelous tools he found nails everywhere.

He also found two presidents and a sycophantic media that hung on his every word.

His figures were excellent. In the earliest days of Vietnam, long before anyone outside of Asia could find it on a map, he produced eerily precise predictions of the costs -- in lives, dollars and time -- of the future conflict. He told them what a civil war in the jungle would look like and they pulled the trigger.

As far as the value of measurement goes; I think most of the low hanging fruit has been picked (a consequence of the "Information Age") and what we struggle to 'measure' today is far less tractable. As a result our measurements are frequently corrupted in the service of prevailing agendas or not permitted at all for fear of undesirable results.

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#105

Post by mcguire »

mrxd wrote: post #44
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…

Just to play devil's advocate, surely their approach is more rational than that. They're probably looking at it from the perspective that the business needs to have a profit margin of X in order to justify investing in it. They probably do understand that cutting costs impacts company culture and morale. But shutting the company down probably impacts that much more.

"But shutting the company down probably impacts that much more."

Is that the only other option?

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#106

Post by mulmen »

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.

Why not just start with ads?

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#107

Post by Buttons840 »

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…

Interesting observation. The PEG managers would probably admit that turnover had some financial cost, but I doubt they ever actually put a number on it and added it to their calculations. Am I right?

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#108

Post by paganel »

rossdavidh wrote: post #96

I believe the McNamara Fallacy is a real thing, although I would say Goodhart's Law expresses the more fundamental issue. But, the examples they give (Vietnam and Afghanistan wars) are bad examples, because in both cases the issue was primarily not that the U.S. military was relying too much on quantitative metrics, but rather that it was being asked to do a job which militaries are not good at. In neither case, desp…

> In neither case, despite what many deniers and apologists proclaim, was the war "winnable" by the military

Basically, to win that war the US military should have been able to previously educate its politicians (i.e. the US politicians) and remind them that as "war is the continuation of politics by other means" so in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq a greater focus should have been given to politics before trying the war thing. After all that's what a guy like Clausewitz did, a general and military theorist whose work ended up educating lots and lots of politicians.

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#109

Post by jasonhansel »

rossdavidh wrote: post #96

I believe the McNamara Fallacy is a real thing, although I would say Goodhart's Law expresses the more fundamental issue. But, the examples they give (Vietnam and Afghanistan wars) are bad examples, because in both cases the issue was primarily not that the U.S. military was relying too much on quantitative metrics, but rather that it was being asked to do a job which militaries are not good at. In neither case, desp…

To quote C. Wright Mills, writing in 1960:

> They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines. Being baffled, and also being very tired of being baffled, they have come to believe that there is no way out—except war—which would remove all the bewildering paradoxes of their tedious and now misguided attempts to construct peace. In place of these paradoxes they prefer the bright, clear problems of war—as they used to be. For they still believe that "winning" means something, although they never tell us what.

Re: The McNamara fallacy: Measurement is not understanding

#110

Post by randcraw »

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?

From what I've seen after the attempt to adopt Six Sigma within a large pharmaceutical, 6S has several inescapable vulnerabilities due to not knowing:

1) which important company components produce signals that aren't measurable (e.g. internalities like deep domain knowledge in R&D or externalities like market swings or competitor behaviors),

2) which signals are too dynamic or complex to optimize, and

3) which signals are insignificant, irrelevant, irreproducible, or simply meaningless noise.

Applying Six Sigma to R&D illustrates these caveats nicely.

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