4 ms·
This reminds me of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." It seems like in the case of employees at a company, just
by 666lumberjack 7y ago
This reminds me of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
It seems like in the case of employees at a company, just knowing that a parameter is being measured can result in it implicitly becoming a target even when there is no explicit focus on it (especially if it is the only or one of a small number of metrics that is discussed).
I have observed that in general most humans are very bad at considering the incentives created by rules and rewards they impose or seek to impose.
- dragonwriter 7y agoGoodhart’s Law really only applies to measures that aren't measuring the actual figure of merit but a proxy that is incorrectly assumed to be inextricably tied to it. This is very common, though, and a real problem associated with it is people pick proxies without clearly documenting (or even thinking through) what they want to measure, why they pick a particular proxy, and how the proxy might fall. As a result, people remote from the decision (including the original decision maker) tend to incautiously apply the proxy because they aren't even aware that it is not the actual figure of merit.
- mikeash 7y agoThe point of the law is that virtually every measure is a proxy to some extent. Finding a measure that exactly matches what you really want to optimize is almost impossible.