281–290 of 377 posts
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what it means to not optimise though is that some people end up better off and many others are worse off.
And what it means to optimise is also that some people end up better off and many others are worse off.
The argument rides on the well-known Goodhart's law ( when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure ). However, it only puts it down to measurement problems, as in, we can't measure the things we really care about, so we optimize some proxies. That, in my view, is a far too reductionist view of the problem. The problem isn't just about measurement, it's about human behavior. Unlike particles, humans…
Well, agents will. If you created a genetic algorithm for an AI agent whose reward function was the amount of dead cobras it got from Delhi, I feel like you'd quickly find that the best performing agent was the one that started breeding cobras. In the human case and in the AI case the reward function has been hacked. In the AI case we decide that the reward function wasn't designed well, but in the human case we decide that the agents are sneaky petes who have a low moral character and "exploited" the system.
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This is true, these "laws" are approximations and imperfect reductions. Which one is useful or descriptive will depend on the specific example. Optimizing ML VS Optimizing a social media algorithm VS using standardized testing to optimize education systems. There is no perfect abstraction that applies to these different scenarios precisely. We don't need that precision. We just need the subsequent intuition about whe…
I missed the citation on his education point. Has someone proved that “teaching to the test” leads to lower educational outcomes than not having tests?
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I don’t think it’s smart to proactively back track without being very careful. One thing that’s needed is for corporate death to be allowed to occur. Right now the downsides of risky behavior is bailed out for large enough risk. Then the companies that fail aren’t robust and the ones that don’t are but bailouts let non robust companies keep going. Otherwise “robustness” is a property without a measure which means tha…
One of the primary reasons people bail out companies are the knock-on effects. People losing jobs, etc. If society itself is robust enough to cover for people in those situations, we could let companies fail far more.
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I can't imagine anyone would object to minimum quality standards for anything receiving federal subsidies.
edit: didn't realize I was feeding a troll. Feel free to ignore. I expect the objections are in how quality is measured and enforced. It reminds me of education system in the US - most people (project 2025 aside) think it's good to have a public education system; having a pipeline of skilled workers makes it easier to build an economy filled with a diverse set of businesses. However, the attacks start to fly when the…
Around a decade ago, the store installed anti-theft cages.
At first they only kept high-dollar items in the cages. It was a bit of an inconvenience, but not so bad. If a customer is dropping $200+ on some fancy power tool, he or she likely doesn't mind waiting five minutes.
But a few years later, there was a change - almost certainly a 'data-driven' change: suddenly there was no discernible logic to which items they caged and which they left uncaged. Now a $500 diagnostics tool is as likely to sit open on a shelf, as a $5 light bulb to be kept under lock and key.
Presumably the change is a result of sorting a database by 'shrinkage' - they lock up the items that cumulatively lose the hardware store the most money, due to theft.
But the result is (a) the store atmosphere reads as "so profit-driven they don't trust the customers not to steal a box of toothpicks" and (b) it's often not worth it for customers to shop there due to the waiting around for an attendant to unlock the cage.
I doubt the optimization helped their bottom-line, even if it has prevented the theft of some $3 bars of soap.
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A mis-assessment there might be far less consequential and those also do not require a medical diagnosis before making a decision where to go.
I've never needed a medical diagnosis to decide between calling my GP and going to an urgent care. It's just a bit surreal to hear everyone else say my ordinary survival skills are impossible and more than could be asked of anybody!
I think it is fine to have some preferences for a hospital, but not sure how much benefit that confers outside of some narrow situations.
The author identifies problems with a system measuring targets, but then all the proposals are about increasing the power and control of the system. Perhaps the answer—as hippy sounding as it is—is to reduce the control of the system outright. Instead of adding more measures, more controls, which are susceptible to the prejudices of control, we let the system fall where it may. This, to me, is a classic post of an ac…
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> private people) can decide to lower their risk exposure I think the complexities of modern societies make it too difficult to measure this risk adequately. We just don’t have the bandwidth to think about the second-and-third order effects for every social/financial interaction we encounter. And people are generally very poor at estimating high-consequence/low-probability events. This means people will often take ve…
>...farming those risks out to institutions seems to be the current way most societies have decided to mitigate those risks Unfortunately, those institutions --be they governments, insurance companies, UL Labs, banks, venture capitalists, etc.--also need to be vetted. Even when staffed with impeccably well credentialed and otherwise highly capable people, their conclusions may be drawn using a different risk framewor…
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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…
But in practice we see that: 1. Firms compete 2. Some firms get ahead 3. Accrued advantages to being ahead amplify 4. A small number of firms dominate 5. New competition is bought or crushed 6. Dominate firms become less efficient in competition-free environment