The "overlearning the game" problem

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

This is often the result of attempting to overoptimize a system. You can optimize a race car to a huge degree, because you know exactly what you want it to do.

You can't optimize a schooling system, because you don't know exactly what you want it to do. A little noise is a good thing, because the you want a little wiggle room for teachers to sidestep the dictums of education czars, and students to sidestep the dictums of teachers.

The Greeks solved this quite a few years ago, with sortition. Under sortition (injecting noise into elections - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition), Bush and Gore would have been forced to pay "paper, scissors, rock" for the presidency. Under the US's more pure democracy, they would have been tempted to make all kind of Faustian bargains with sordid players to nail down the last 0.01% of votes.

Randomization means that the last percent is just not worth chasing, so players in a competition won't be tempted to bend the rules for a tiny advantage.

The same process could be used for tests. If you allocate places in desirable courses (say medicine) randomly to anyone above a certain score, the top students won't bother drilling as hard just to get the top score.

Stocks are the same - quants wouldn't sweat timing as much if their placement in order books was randomized. It would be more efficient to pay attention to fundamental value than momentary fluctuations if they weren't guaranteed to make large profits on the momentary fluctuations. Some would still work on timing, but not as many.

Patents are just bad policy badly implemented at the moment, not over-optimized.

These "games" are basically the equivalent of counting lines of code or checkins. We're measuring poor proxies instead of the things we're actually interested in. The solution isn't an arms race to build bigger and better proxies, the solution is to measure real things instead of artificial ones.

Here's just one example of what I mean by "measure real things". Electing representatives every X years to decide the laws of the land was once upon a time the fairest and best way to have the voices of the masses heard. Today it is feasible to directly poll everybody about every issue, so we no longer need the proxy. If you say everyone cannot be educated about every issue, fine, I can "follow" PG's votes on wall street reform and grellas's votes on IP tort reform and Schneier's votes on TSA etc just by copying their votes on those issues into my ballot, a permission which I can revoke at any time or on a vote-by-vote basis, as easy as unfollowing them on VoteTwitter. This is better than the proxy of professional politicians deciding every issue with fixed terms.

The US political system pretty much guarantees bad budgeting. Members of Congress are elected fairly independently. There is no party discipline, so each member will operate independently to maximise pork. This encourages horse-trading within and across party lines; nobody can be forced to give up something for a general good.

There's more: there's no incentive to balance the budget. The Executive's separation means that Congress does not need to concern itself with proper administration; it only doles out the cash. It has every incentive to ... maximise pork.

The dynamic behaviour of American government arises from the static structure. The drafters of the constitution drew on their knowledge of history and current affairs to try and avoid certain pitfalls. The US Constitution was state-of-the-art when it was written. It's less so now.

Countries where the Executive is formed out of the Legislative -- the Westminster system -- tend to have much stronger party discipline, because that discipline is required to pass budgets, enact legislation and to form the Executive. This tends to almost eliminate horse-trading, except between parties and independents. It's not perfect -- whole parties can engage in pork too -- but when policy emerges that benefits the many at the cost of a few, countries with party discipline will find it easier to adopt than those without.

Australia, which has the amongst the toughest party discipline in the democratic world, is also a reform leader. And I think a lot of that is explained by our constitutional arrangements.

The primary purpose of a game is generally to Have Fun. This purpose is lost if you have "solved" the game. The stated purpose of patents is to foster innovation. However it doesn't work[2]. The purpose of schools is learning. However its methods are flawed [3,4]. And so on.

The trick is to know your goals, and then find out means to best achieve them. The author said:

> But, in real life, we need to keep "playing the game": we need to have elections, and protections for inventors, and laws that govern society, and a market where companies can raise money.

But the actual goals are different: We don't need election, we need a working democratic system (which may, or may not, mandate elections). We don't need protections for inventors, we need innovations. We don't need laws, we need a fair and working society. We don't need a market where companies can raise money, we need a working economy.

Well, I could attempt recurse further up until pure morality, but that would be intractable. But at least you get the idea. If something looks broken, think about its ultimate purpose before you try to fix it.

[1]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/le/lost_purposes/

[2]: http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm

[3]: http://vimeo.com/5513063 (Dr Tae)

[4]: http://www.khanacademy.org/

For example, look at this: http://www.abc.net.au/elections/federal/2010/guide/deni.htm With USA's system, Australia Labor Party would have got re-elected.

There's still improvements to be made for democracy that doesn't need to involve such fancy technology yet [1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duvergers_law

[1] http://techpp.com/2011/06/08/homomorphic-encryption/

For me, as a Zen student, the solution is to just accept that that it is, what it is. No system (shape, for Zen students) can be perfect. It is created to solve a problem and with time starts to fail badly at doing anything about the problem. Then another system is created by someone else and the cycle restarts. You might think for example that the stock market or democracy is a thing that doesn't change, because it exists longer then you live. But in the end it will change. We had different political systems before and we will develop different systems in the future.

So in the end the system is one of the most important things we have, because it gives us something to base our decisions and actions on and goals to strive for. But also the system is nothing, just an illusion we create for us, maybe based on how we understand the illusions other people created for themself.

The thing that is interesting to me personally is that every system itself is instable and will change or die in the end. But the life cycle of a system, what it does for us and doesn't, that all will always stay the same and even though we try to change that, we will never succeed. So while it changes a lot in one way it is totally unchangable in another. But that just as a side note.

The problem is that some elements in society have become extremely effective at creating a perversion of "stuff people want" for their own benefit. They exploit loopholes in the system, whether by preying upon the poorly-informed, shifting costs onto externalities that we can't price properly, engaging in corruption, or producing items of questionable actual value but very attractive perceived value. They take advantage of our desire for easy answers to our problems with minimal effort expended.

Case in point: Ponzi schemes, coal power plants, Halliburton, the tobacco industry, Zynga, and even to an extent, religion

We've tried to control this with laws, education, and social norms, but ultimately it seems the invisible hand reigns supreme.

Perhaps another way to look at the problem is to imagine creating an A.I. that you want to succeed at whatever system you present. In most cases, an A.I. will take the literal interpretation of the system and become a test-taker, an electable 'gotcha-game' politician or even an entity that finds it can maximize game theory to its own ends by complicating the rules of an existing system to the point of absurdity once it becomes powerful enough to modify and create rules.

So then how do we create systems resistant to beings that take everything literally? I suppose the only way is to reward certain outcomes as opposed to rewarding the direct product of the system itself.

Examples: After an election, have we elected someone who has met with a high degree of favorability in the electorate by the end of his term?

After having students become proficient test-takers, do they then become excellent doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.. ?

In a game invented to be fun or fair, once overlearned, do they produce fun or fairness?

If not, then a new game needs to be created or the existing one might need to be extensively modified to produced the desired product. This is where the internet shines, where everyone is welcome to take an existing system and modify it to something better. The problem with politics, law, stock market, etc... is that they have become the only method adopted in real society (there is only one game in town).

If reality were allowed to adopt, incorporate or evolve from systems/games from virtual reality (i.e. internet) there might be some productive change. But first we would need to see the first step taking place, that being even flawed virtual systems are allowed to manifest in significant proportion within real life society.

Don't hate the game, hate the player. Every game that profits a winner will have its cheaters.

The only way to do this with much larger systems, such as systems of governance, is revolution or exploring new lands. Personally I'm a bit concerned about revolution -- the assumption with refactoring is that the people refactoring understand what the "good" parts are and what the "bad" parts are. They also need to be able to generalize and simplify in order to keep the system cognitively approachable. In my experience, it's very easy to be angry-tear-down-the-system guy, very difficult to actually refactor. As the author points out, it's not that these systems are entirely useless. The hell of the thing is that the reasons for creating these systems are still very valid.

I remain convinced that programmers (hackers) have a lot to add to the discussion when talking about complex, brittle systems. After all, we spend a lot of time both working with them and fixing them. To me, programming and systems architecture is applied philosophy. Very cool stuff.

What's the difference between your "overlearning" and "hacking"? They sound like the same thing.

This phenomenon is the reason for the Wikipedia rule, "Ignore All Rules".

However, I got hooked on thinking about the childhood game that he mentions briefly in the introduction. Asking more and more questions about an object and wanting all of them to be consistent is a good description of mathematics. According to Godel, both teams are bound to lose, because you cannot create a system of descriptions/properties about a system that are self-consistent (as their number increases), there will always be questions to a team whose answer will be inconsistent with the previous set of questions. The game is then to see which team can push the inevitable further.

IDEABOLT: It would be interesting to develop a program that plays this game. Each answer could be stored as an RDF statement in database.

Finite games like the one invented by the children described by the OP have end states, they have winners, and the goal within them are always framed from that perspective. While infinite games have no winners, have no end, and the goals are often framed around ensuring that the game never ends.

It's easy to think of finite games in our lives, they are everywhere in our society, and the OP does a good job of pointing out some of the less obvious cases. Infinite games are less obvious, the one that I found most illuminating was "language", a game where people actively collude to extend the game to the end of time, and has no winner.

Anyay, it's an interesting read, but a little bit mumbo-jumbo by the middle of the book. I would recommend it.

http://www.amazon.com/Finite-Infinite-Games-Vision-Possibili...

There is no optimal system, be it political, economic or whatever.

You can always find loopholes.

I think it is time we take responsibility for what we do - then there is no need for a better system.

The patent system is not responsible for people attacking each other - its the people.