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<div dir="ltr" style="font-family: garamond, "new york", times, serif;">In my opinion, stand-alone <i><u>efficiency</u></i> is the wrong criterion; in most cases, <i><u>effectiveness</u></i> would be closer to what’s desired. Effectiveness, even though perhaps harder to quantify, relates to goals; efficiency doesn’t necessarily.<br clear="none"></div><div dir="ltr"> </div><div dir="ltr"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Efficiency shouldn’t stand apart from the objective(s) one wants to achieve. As Harry’s post illustrates, making efficiency into a primary goal can often lead people to irrelevant or perverse outcomes, while tricking people into thinking the “efficient” solution is the most desirable in its own right.</span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><br></span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">These are some of the truly pertinent questions:</span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">- “Are these the right objectives?” </span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">- “How well do our methods/approaches lead to fulfilling those objectives?” (And why?)</span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">- “Do our methods produce undesirable side effects?”</span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">- “Are other methods/approaches equally good, or better, at achieving the objectives?</span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><br></span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Here’s a close business/management analog to efficiency (one might say it’s sometimes been confused with efficiency): Milton Friedman’s (formerly?) widely embraced dictum that businesses should seek maximal profitability above all other considerations (resiliency, or market share, for example).. Profit basically became a proxy for efficiency. It benefitted many businesses in the short run; but as the example of General Electric demonstrated, it could destroy businesses.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: garamond, "new york", times, serif;"><br></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: garamond, "new york", times, serif;"> – Mike Alexander</div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: garamond, "new york", times, serif;"><br></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-family: garamond, "new york", times, serif;"><br></div><div style="font-family: garamond, "new york", times, serif;"><br clear="none"></div>
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On Monday, July 10, 2023 at 05:13:20 PM EDT, SlateMD <slatemd@comcast.net> wrote:
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<div><div id="yiv4589334505"><div>I’ll bet that this has all sorts of applications. I wonder if the governors of the Federal Reserve with their “data driven” approach have this in mind. Probably not.<div>Jerry <br clear="none"><br clear="none"><div dir="ltr">Jerome Slate<div>339 368 0075</div></div><div dir="ltr"><div id="yiv4589334505yqtfd57443" class="yiv4589334505yqt9764540598"><br clear="none"><blockquote type="cite">On Jul 10, 2023, at 1:35 PM, Jon Dreyer <jon@jondreyer.org> wrote:<br clear="none"><br clear="none"></blockquote></div></div><div id="yiv4589334505yqtfd98175" class="yiv4589334505yqt9764540598"><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr">
</div></blockquote></div></div></div><div id="yiv4589334505yqtfd05660" class="yiv4589334505yqt9764540598"></div><div><div id="yiv4589334505yqtfd21512" class="yiv4589334505yqt9764540598"><p>By the time I got through the first few paragraphs, I remembered
that, over a decade ago, I saw the danger of what he calls
"overfitting" in education and coined what I called "the implicit
motto of education reform":</p>
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<p><i>If you can't measure what you value, value what you can
measure.</i></p>
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<p>So I was not surprised to see education as the first on the list
of examples of the the danger of overfitting in section 3.</p>
<p>I'd not read of Goodhart's Law, either the weak or strong forms,
but I had discovered the idea. It seems increasingly important to
keep in mind as technology makes it ever easier to measure things.
A few examples I don't think I saw in the article are measuring
executive performance by measuring quarterly financials or
measuring software engineers by lines of code.<br clear="none">
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Jon "Measure Twice, Gut Once" Dreyer<br clear="none">
<a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" shape="rect" target="_blank" href="http://www.passionatelycurious.com">Math Tutor/Computer
Science Tutor</a><br clear="none">
<a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" shape="rect" target="_blank" href="http://music.jondreyer.com">Jon Dreyer Music</a>
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<div class="yiv4589334505moz-cite-prefix">On 7/10/23 8:40 AM, Harry Forsdick
wrote:<br clear="none">
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<div style="font-family:verdana, sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(11,83,148);" class="yiv4589334505gmail_default">Interesting
use of ML/AI:</div>
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<div style="" class="yiv4589334505gmail_default"><span style="color:rgb(11,83,148);font-family:verdana, sans-serif;">Too
much efficiency makes everything worse: overfitting and
the strong version of Goodhart's law</span></div>
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<ul><li><span style="color:rgb(11,83,148);font-family:verdana, sans-serif;"><a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" shape="rect" target="_blank" href="https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.html" class="yiv4589334505moz-txt-link-freetext">https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.html</a></span></li></ul>
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<div style="font-family:verdana, sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(11,83,148);" class="yiv4589334505gmail_default">--
Harry</div>
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