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This reminds me of Eli Goldratt's quote: "Tell me how you measure me, I will tell you how I behave."
The female peacock is using the make peacock’s tail as a proxy for fitness - with beautiful consequences, but the males with the largest, showiest tails are clearly less fit
The female peacock is using the make peacock’s tail as a proxy for fitness - with beautiful consequences, but the males with the largest, showiest tails are clearly less fit, and more prone to predation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m confused, because the “not trick” I’m talking about is the boondoggle created by giving people exactly what they ask for, making nobody happy and jamming up your throughput in the process.
To be specific: if you can find a way to make fridges for half the previous cost, and you can sell them for three quarters the previous price, you don't want to talk people out of buying more fridges. In fact, them buying vastly more fridges is exactly what you want.
Really interesting article. Got me pondering the extent to which the peacock’s tail is an example of overfitting and Goodhart's The female peacock is using the make peacock’s tail as a proxy for fitness - with beautiful consequences, but the males with the largest, showiest tails are clearly less fit, and more prone to predation.
Or put another way: someone who wins the Olympic 100m sprint while hopping on one leg is a better runner that everyone else in the race by a wide margin.
Randomly chosen deliberative bodies could keep some of the stupid polarization in check, especially if your chances to be chosen twice into the same body are infinetesimal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
We tend to consider "democracy" as fundamentally equivalent to "free and fair elections", but sortition would be another democratic mechanism that could complement our voting systems. Arguably more democratic, as you need money and a support structure to have a chance to win an election.
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I feel that a 100% efficient system is not resilient. Even minor disruptions in subsystems lead to major breakdowns. There’s no room to absorb shocks. We saw a drastic version of this during COVID-19 induced supply chain collapse. Car manufacturers had built near 100% just in time manufacturing that they couldn’t absorb chip shortages and it took them years to get back up. It also leaves no room for experimentation.…
This is coincides with my headcannon cause of the business cycle. 1. Firms compete 2. Firms either increase their efficiency or die 3. Efficient firms are more susceptible to shocks 4. Firm shutdown and closures are themselves shocks 5. Eventually the system reaches a critical point where the aggregate susceptibility is higher than the aggregate of shocks that will be generated by shutdowns and closures 6. Any extern…
A species will specialise for a niche, and outcompete a generalist. But when conditions change, the generalist can adapt and the specialist suffers.
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Strictly speaking this is not the contrapositive and therefore the proof is yet to be seen. A sound corollary: "If I do not behave, it is because you did not measure me."
Is a contrapositive a corollary? P implies Q is logically equivalent to Not Q implies Not P. A corollary would be some other relation that can be deduced as a result of P implies Q, not simply a restatement of P implies Q. (Using the discrete math definition of imply, not the colloquial definition of imply).
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The exciting thing about this idea is if you can correlate, say, economics with the works of ML, that means a computer program which you can run, revise and alter can directly give you measurable data about these complex system interactions that mostly have existed as a platonic idea since reality is too nuanced and multiple to validate concepts formally. With the idea that there is some subset of logic that sits bel…
This idea has been pursued several times in the past, and it always ends up producing lots of interesting academic results and no practical conclusions. It's certainly an interesting perspective on the development of complex systems. The idea that an economy can be somehow overfitted to its own incentives and constraints I don't think is entirely new, cf the Beer Game. But as a general concept, it's certainly not som…
There was also something about lower state expenditures (...taxes...) giving better results for the people - that's the one that seems to be very popular with rich people for some reason. Go figure.