<story><title>The &quot;overlearning the game&quot; problem</title><url>http://andrewoneverything.com/the-overlearning-the-game-problem</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wisty</author><text>It&apos;s related to Goodhart&apos;s Law:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is often the result of attempting to overoptimize a system. You can optimize a race car to a huge degree, because you know &lt;i&gt;exactly&lt;/i&gt; what you want it to do.&lt;p&gt;You can&apos;t optimize a schooling system, because you &lt;i&gt;don&apos;t&lt;/i&gt; 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.&lt;p&gt;The Greeks solved this quite a few years ago, with sortition. Under sortition (injecting noise into elections - &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition&lt;/a&gt;), Bush and Gore would have been forced to pay &quot;paper, scissors, rock&quot; for the presidency. Under the US&apos;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.&lt;p&gt;Randomization means that the last percent is just not worth chasing, so players in a competition won&apos;t be tempted to bend the rules for a tiny advantage.&lt;p&gt;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&apos;t bother drilling as hard just to get the top score.&lt;p&gt;Stocks are the same - quants wouldn&apos;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&apos;t guaranteed to make large profits on the momentary fluctuations. Some would still work on timing, but not as many.&lt;p&gt;Patents are just bad policy badly implemented at the moment, not over-optimized.</text></comment>
<story><title>The &quot;overlearning the game&quot; problem</title><url>http://andrewoneverything.com/the-overlearning-the-game-problem</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>drewcrawford</author><text>If you pay a man by the hour, he&apos;ll work a lot of hours.  If you pay him by the brick, he&apos;ll lay a lot of bricks.&lt;p&gt;These &quot;games&quot; are basically the equivalent of counting lines of code or checkins.  We&apos;re measuring poor proxies instead of the things we&apos;re actually interested in.  The solution isn&apos;t an arms race to build bigger and better proxies, the solution is to measure real things instead of artificial ones.&lt;p&gt;Here&apos;s just one example of what I mean by &quot;measure real things&quot;.  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 &quot;follow&quot; PG&apos;s votes on wall street reform and grellas&apos;s votes on IP tort reform and Schneier&apos;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.</text></comment>