Links 2023-12-19 - Saying "No"

You don't have to play the game.

Here are three links loosely connected in that they all in one way or another are rejecting the contemporary received wisdom.

Adam Mastroianni looks around and sees Goodhart’s Law everywhere. At which he then directs us to drive a stake through the heart of it. Read it all, but here are the key takeaways:

This is the inexorable logic of Goodhart's Law: wherever there's a system, there will be people gaming it. Journals prefer to publish papers with “statistically significant” results, so researchers develop all kinds of clever hacks for slipping their stats under the threshold. The Affordable Care Act legally limited health insurance companies' profits, so those companies started buying clinics and pharmacies, where the profits are unlimited. My local library used raffle off prizes by giving kids a ticket for every book they read, so my sister and I would check out huge stacks of the shortest books we could find, speed-read them, and turn them back in for tickets, two lil living Goodharts.

That's where the discussion of Goodhart's Law usually ends. Oh, the hubris of the people who design these systems! Oh, the nefariousness of the villains who game them! It's too bad we must live in a never-ending cat-and-mouse game where the good-hearted try to fix incentives and institutions faster than the bad-hearted can Goodhart them. But hey, that's why it's called Goodhart's Law, and not Goodhart's Temporary But Ultimately Solvable Problem.

And look, if we all spent a little more time meditating on the inevitable perversion of all incentives and the perpetual struggle to build and maintain systems that work, that would be great. But ol' Chucky Goodhart's observation has a lot more to give us. Goodhart's Law doesn't just explain how bad actors fool institutions. It also explains how good actors fool themselves. That is, we think we're Goodharting each other, but we're often Goodharting ourselves.

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If you break open a Goodhart situation, you'll find two components inside: quantification (measuring something) and optimization (targeting that measure). Neither of these things is inherently bad, and neither is their combination. If you want to build more fuel-efficient cars, save enough for retirement, or pick the right AirBnB for a family reunion, you need to do some quantification and optimization.

The problem is that no measure is ever perfect, and the more you rely on a measure, the more you multiply its imperfections, and the more consequential they become.

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That's what you have to recognize if you want to bust out of your personal Goodhart hell. People will cheer for you even as you're Goodharting yourself: “Way to go jumping through those hoops!” “Congratulations on being the best at playing the game!” “You made the number go up, wahoo!” I have wasted a good chunk of my life chasing exactly that kind of praise. I thought I was winning, but the only way to win Goodhart's game is to walk away.

Incidentally, this great post by Mastroianni reminded me of a post I did long ago about thinking beyond optimization at a “free” tailgate party. There is both Goodharting and anti-Goodharting at play in that old post.

Relatedly, Gurwinder offers five heuristics to help in decision-making. I would label these all as techniques around the pitfalls of Goodhart’s Law. The conventional view is that we should dwell on a decision to get it right. But as the prior linked post demonstrated, that is a dangerous and stupid game to play. On Regret Minimization he explains:

One way to achieve this is with the 10:10:10 strategy: consider how a decision will affect you in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years. This is particularly good for fighting addictions. For instance, if you’re on a diet but craving a chocolate muffin, consider how you’ll feel 10 minutes after consuming it, and you’ll realize you’ll no longer taste the chocolatiness, and will only feel guilt. Furthermore, in 10 months you’ll have no memory of ever having eaten it. By stepping outside the present moment, you become less vulnerable to the desire for immediate gratification.

More momentous decisions benefit from even bigger leaps through time. When trying to decide whether to start a business called Amazon, Jeff Bezos imagined himself at 80 years, looking back at his life. He realized that what he would’ve regretted most was not failing but never trying.

Think about it: somewhere in the future, your older self is watching you through memories.

Whether it's with regret or nostalgia depends on what you do now.

When presented with the question of God, atheists say “No!”. Aaron Ross Powell understands this but also understands that the typical way atheists explain it to theists is both condescending and critically insufficient. Hence, non believers shouldn’t be surprised when people of faith are left dumbfounded if not insulted.

It’s a common argument in atheist circles. Richard Dawkins—who’s done more than anyone to make atheism synonymous with antisocial misanthropes—puts it like this, paraphrasing Stephen F. Roberts: “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

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Responding “What’s it like to not believe in Zeus?” to “What’s it like to be an atheist?” isn't analogous to responding “What’s it like to not watch hockey?” when asked “What’s it like to not watch football?” It’s not like answering “It’s just one fewer” if someone asks you, “What’s it like having just one car for your family instead of two?”  Rather, it’s as if you answered “What is it like to not believe the universe has purpose and meaning?” with “What’s it like to not believe in unicorns?” The answer doesn’t just fail to address the question, but by believing that it does, the atheist also fails to demonstrate that they have an understanding of what the religious worldview is in the first place. 

For the faithful, religion presents a universe that is full and purposeful. It provides not just metaphysical solutions to thorny philosophical problems (cosmology, free will, morality, and so on), but also a sense that one has a place, that one’s life has meaning, that one is part of something bigger than oneself. All of that is really important stuff. What the “one fewer god” quip does is brush all of it aside without acknowledging its importance, and without offering anything to fill those gaps.