Limitations of Goodhart's Law
commoncog.com
Limitations of Goodhart's Law
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Re: Limitations of Goodhart's Law
#2This is such a compelling article on Goodharts law and interesting to see how Amazon conducts their Weekly Business Reviews. I'm wondering if there's a rebuttal to this piece.
Re: Limitations of Goodhart's Law
#3This is a nice refinement to the discussion.
There is an element of truth to Goodhart's law, but it is certainly not a law and it is maybe not even a default condition. As per the author, the work of Demming clearly shows that measuring tolerances has a good effect on quality. I personally even seen Goodhart's law (mis)applied to discussions of machine learning pipelines, so clearly there are glaring exceptions to the utility of metrics.
Re: Limitations of Goodhart's Law
#4I've always considered Goodhart's Law to be "of the people," but the article offers only top down solutions. What is the solution when the decision-makers have subjected you to a Goodhartable system of incentives and don't have enough awareness, vision, or humility themselves to change the system as described in the article? Well, you play the game or get beat by those who do. Right up until the point when you all lose.
I agree that if you're the one in control, complaining about Goodhart's Law is a sort of learned helplessness. However for those not in control -- and this goes as well for scenarios with diffuse control such as large crowds and democracy -- Goodhart's Law is useful, in the way that naming any systemic ailment is useful.
Perhaps we can talk about the 'hard problem' of Goodhart's Law to separate it from the problem solved in the article. Does anyone have good advice for those living inside the hard problem?
Re: Limitations of Goodhart's Law
#5You can really tell when someone has never worked in a call center
Re: Limitations of Goodhart's Law
#6This is a nice refinement to the discussion. There is an element of truth to Goodhart's law, but it is certainly not a law and it is maybe not even a default condition. As per the author, the work of Demming clearly shows that measuring tolerances has a good effect on quality. I personally even seen Goodhart's law (mis)applied to discussions of machine learning pipelines, so clearly there are glaring exceptions to th…
> Goodhart's law (mis)applied to discussions of machine learning pipelines
I see a way in which it overlaps with this issue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting
Re: Limitations of Goodhart's Law
#7This is such a compelling article on Goodharts law and interesting to see how Amazon conducts their Weekly Business Reviews. I'm wondering if there's a rebuttal to this piece.
Not a direct rebuttal.. but there are several things that need to come together for this to work.
1. The leadership team should trust each other's data. Over a period of time, that has not been true. 2. The group reviewing the data depends on everyone being there long enough to understand and get the feel. That is also hard to achieve and imho, is no longer true. 3. The metrics tend to ignore the cost to the workers. After all, everything looks like numbers and charts.
For me, WBR is a mechanism, but Amazon's focus on just the metrics has hurt its workers, employees, sellers and partners a lot.
Re: Limitations of Goodhart's Law
#8I've always considered Goodhart's Law to be "of the people," but the article offers only top down solutions. What is the solution when the decision-makers have subjected you to a Goodhartable system of incentives and don't have enough awareness, vision, or humility themselves to change the system as described in the article? Well, you play the game or get beat by those who do. Right up until the point when you all lo…
I think trying to identify a separate "Hard Goodhart's Law" or whatever is a bit silly. Very little you've said here is really specific to Goodhart's Law. If you don't have the power to solve the problem, then, well, you can't solve the problem. You're left with the standard options for working with any bad system: go with the flow, leave, try to gain more power, etc.
Which is not too say that asking for advice is a bad idea, quite the opposite. Just that said advice doesn't need a special name.
Re: Limitations of Goodhart's Law
#9> [Goodhart's Law] is descriptive; it tells you of the existence of a phenomenon, but it doesn’t tell you what to do about it or how to solve it.
This is the difference between an adage and an essay. And I will say just thunking about the existence of Goodhart's Law whenever you design a system is all you really need. Any time you make a metric, put yourself in the shoes of the people who will be judged by the metric, and try to game it as hard as you can. Ask others to try to game it. And if the cheating you discover is manageable, use it. If not, get rid of it.
Re: Limitations of Goodhart's Law
#10This is such a compelling article on Goodharts law and interesting to see how Amazon conducts their Weekly Business Reviews. I'm wondering if there's a rebuttal to this piece.
Not a direct rebuttal.. but there are several things that need to come together for this to work. 1. The leadership team should trust each other's data. Over a period of time, that has not been true. 2. The group reviewing the data depends on everyone being there long enough to understand and get the feel. That is also hard to achieve and imho, is no longer true. 3. The metrics tend to ignore the cost to the workers.…
By "no longer", do you mean at Amazon particularly?