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There is actually a term for this in economics. It's called the "Lucas critique", and effectively states that any metric will be gamed eventually. It's slightly
by cyphar 8y ago
There is actually a term for this in economics. It's called the "Lucas critique", and effectively states that any metric will be gamed eventually. It's slightly more subtle and is actually a critique about macroeconomic policymaking -- that people's actions are not structural and that making a new policy will affect how people act as they try to (ab)use the new policy -- but that's the basic gist.
EDIT: To clarify -- I'm not an economist, it's just something I read about in my spare time. I'm sure that the Lucas critique was pre-dated by other ideas (it's far too obvious to be entirely novel), and that there's a much deeper analysis that I wasn't aware of.
- elvinyung 8y agoLucas critique is predated by Campbell's law and Goodhart's law.
- lordnacho 8y agoIMO the deeper history in Lucas Critique is the Problem of Induction. "XYZ has always worked in the past" doesn't work. Imagine doing machine learning on this problem that Bird has. It could easily suggest that you should up the fees to get more scooter finders, rather than that you need to change the incentives.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thousandautumns 8y agoI believe this is related to another principle in Economics called Goodhart's Law, which essentially states that as soon as something becomes a metric for measuring performance, it ceases to be a valid measure of actual performance. Essentially using something as a performance metric creates the incentive to game the system, inflate their values, and generally divorce the metric from the phenomenon it's trying to measure.
- base698 8y agoThis was described in "The Wire" as juking the stats: https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM