Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022)

Teaching is a terrible example. Teaching is actually more efficient when it is decentralised as the teachers can adapt to local environment and changes. With centralisation you have bad feedback loop.

It would be nice, if us on HN, can crowdsource, some good KPIs/Proxies for the goals mentioned in the article.

These ones:

Goal: Educate children well Proxy: Measure student and school performance on standardized tests Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Schools narrowly focus on teaching students to answer questions like those on the test, at the expense of the underlying skills the test is intended to measure

--- Goal: Rapid progress in science Proxy: Pay researchers a cash bonus for every publication Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Publication of incorrect or incremental results, collusion between reviewers and authors, research paper mills

--- Goal: A well-lived life Proxy: Maximize the reward pathway in the brain Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Substance addiction, gambling addiction, days lost to doomscrolling Twitter

--- Goal: Healthy population Proxy: Access to nutrient-rich food Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Obesity epidemic

--- Goal: Leaders that act in the best interests of the population Proxy: Leaders that have the most support in the population Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Leaders whose expertise and passions center narrowly around manipulating public opinion at the expense of social outcomes

--- Goal: An informed, thoughtful, and involved populace Proxy: The ease with which people can share and find ideas Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Filter bubbles, conspiracy theories, parasitic memes, escalated tribalism

--- Goal: Distribution of labor and resources based upon the needs of society Proxy: Capitalism Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Massive wealth disparities (with incomes ranging from hundreds of dollars per year to hundreds of dollars per second), with more than a billion people living in poverty

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I will start:

Goal: Leaders that act in the best interests of the population

Good proxy: Mandate that local leaders can only send their kids to the schools in their precinct. They can only take their families to the hospitals in their precincts.

Happiness is a valid goal. If one perceives it’s not reasonable to expect it, then you may arrive at this conclusion. But imo that’s because we short-circuit happiness to sources of pleasure that we see aren’t that reliable.

Hell, even this settling for happiness as a side-product is a result of the judgement that this is the best we can do regarding the goal of happiness.

I would claim in a completely informal way that the optimal degree of utilization is ln(2)=0.693, around 70%.

This stems from the optimal load of self-balancing trees.

A little bit of slack is always useful to deal with the unforeseen.

And even a lot of slack is useful (though not always as it is costly) as it enables to do things that a dedicated resource cannot do.

On the other hand, no slack at all (so running at above 70%) makes a system inflexible and unresilient.

I would argue for this in any circumstance, be it military, be it public transit, be it funding, be it allocation of resources for a particular task.

I would put it at

  1 - e^(-1) ~= 0.6321

As e^x is a commonly occurring curve and at that point its derivative goes below 1, meaning from that point on it's diminishing returns.