Campbell's Law: The dark side of metric fixation
nngroup.com
nngroup.com
… The singular focus on a metric imposed from the top-down obliterated any incentive to innovate or differentiate production according to what customers might actually want.» https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilychamleewright/2020/01/15/w...
[edit]
* - Thanks to the commenter above for the correction.
Note: I've tried to be more careful in not implicating eBay's entire advertising division.
> Campbell’s law states that the more important a metric is in social decision making, the more likely it is to be manipulated.
> Goodhart’s Law, states that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.
These are basically paraphrases if you accept that “target” = “important in decision making”, and “likely to be manipulated” = “not a good measure”.
That’s fine, important discoveries are often made multiple times independently, but let’s not pretend there’s some important difference where there isn’t any.
There's a scene or two in The Wire about "Juking the stats" (1) - its about fooling the people in order to look good and meet campaign promises. Manipulating indeed. More like "Mayor Carcetti's going to juke himself a second term"
> “Wally is going to code himself a minivan” (Dilbert ref) from Goodhart
Not really, Goodhart was talking about UK monetary policy in 1975. It's political from the start. (2)
These aren't different.
1) https://medium.com/@roshanrevankar/juking-the-stats-5926eaf5...
2) "Goodhart's law is an adage named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who advanced the idea in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom, Problems of Monetary Management: the U.K. Experience:
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
(Wikipedia)
As a result the metrics that tend to be tracked are not just the measurable ones, but the ones for which the importance of them and the meaning of their values are comprehended by sometimes a very low common denominator audience. Usually needing to be tied directly in some way to money. (INdirectly doesn’t cut it, that ends up being too confusing a lot of the time).
I think my example would be the quasi-metric of the single-sample workup you'd get at a hospital. You get a single datapoint. Compare that to a longer term study where samples are taken at 4 hour intervals. The latter brings up a lot of subsequent questions and has a lot of interconnections with the world at large and the individual's biological characteristics. E.g. getting caught by a train 2/5 days, boosting cortisol and norepinephrine, or low receptor affinity for X, thus producing the illusion of high X levels. As you modify you also complicate with an increasingly large list of rules. Or you just write a script for statins and pat Tom on the ass, noting next visit that serum cholesterol is down.
In one sense, it seems as if the interview process is to indoctrinate a cult from the onset. I’m willing to bet there are people who go through this process, get rejected, and think the Facebook framework is THE right framework.
As a non Facebook user, I’m conflicted between hating their products to the core… on the other, their TC is salivating.
Yes, I would say this is true in general at all companies, though I prefer the phrase "company/team culture" to "cult" (the phrases aren't that different in what they describe, just in emotional tone).
Because it is not in itself a negative. every team has a culture, by definition of "culture".
If they can make this explicit in the interview, then you as the candidate get a good sense of what this culture is and if you want to be a part of the team.
If they can not make this explicit in the interview, then you as the candidate know that they don't have control over this variable, again giving you valuable information on if you want to be part of the team.
Which concisely explains why the algos have zero correlation with moral compass, societal value, common decency, or caring for the commons upon which FB earns its wealth.
None of that can be measured, so it is all cut down and falls at the feet of the engagement algorithms. The result is an org whose business model is poisoning the common well for profit.
Some metrics are useful. For the most pert I hate metrics. But you must deliver to managers if said managers lost touch with operations. They think they know what's going on by checking their metrics.
The purpose of weighing the pig is to see if what you are doing to the pig is working to fatten it.
This also holds for the fiat monetary system; a metric by which all economic value is measured. It has been manipulated in completely unjust ways to serve the interests of capital holders (and corporations) and that corruption is hidden behind mind-numbing complexity.
Having worked both inside and outside of the finance sector. I sensed that as I got closer to the money printers in my career, people's logic seemed to break down and they seemed to understand less and less what's going on. You start to meet people with unbelievably huge blind-spots. It's weird. It's as if people were selected for these roles based on their tunnel vision and unwavering faith in authority.
- You need to be using several metrics, not just one or a few.
- You need a certain amount of noise in the system.
[1] http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/240-goodharts-law-and-w...
Another one is "Execution eats strategy for breakfast".
The past 10 - 20 years there are so many of these being fed to people and it often took a long time before the sentiment shift.
> It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth.
https://deming.org/myth-if-you-cant-measure-it-you-cant-mana...
One surprising thing is that a lot of people go through life with serious existential dread, and that you can't really empathize with what it's like until you experience it yourself. Sometimes I wonder what the point is –– we evolved that behavior for a reason, and I can't think of a single way it improves one's ability to produce grandchildren. (Apparently the best evolutionary traits are those that let your children have children, rather than you having children directly, which was sort of counterintuitive.) In my experience, the existential dread seems to do nothing but chip away at people and their relationships.
Life gets strange at 30+. If you're around 20, my advice would be to relax and enjoy yourself, and truly realize that almost nothing you do now will matter in the long run. The reason that pushing yourself seems like the path to success is because you don't hear about the 9 out of 10 cases of ruined lives as a result of unrealistic expectations. But it's very easy to get caught up in being driven, as if it's religion.
Just find something small that makes you happy. Even if it's a pointless number puzzle, it's still yours. And that's good enough.
But that kind of thing can happen at any time. You just don't really notice it till you get older, so you never slow down to appreciate the people around you while they're there. Or at least, I didn't, for a long time. Been trying to change that in recent years.
Anyway, I really don't care about seeming weird. The weirdness is life itself, being a descendent of a monkey on a spinning speck of dust in the cosmic soup, worried about an abstraction we call money just to climb a societal ladder that doesn't really matter much in the end.
Everyone has to walk their own path, but my goal was to get one of you to stop and think about how you want to spend the next few years of your life. I've seen so many people allow themselves to think that work = life, and most of them seem to regret it. So I try to consciously avoid that in my own. Maybe you will too.
You could try this series: http://rickroderick.org/200-guide-nietzsche-and-the-postmode...
Seems like Nietzsche already saw this coming with science dealing a death blow to the old myths that kept people going, and with the advent of mobile terminals and apps optimized to keep our attention, I think we've just gotten closer to that vision.