I recognize the author Jascha as an incredibly brilliant ML researcher, formerly at Google Brain and now at Anthropic.
Among his notable accomplishments, he and coauthors mathematically characterized the propagation of signals through deep neural networks via techniques from physics and statistics (mean field and free probability theory). Leading to arguably some of the most profound yet under-appreciated theoretical and experimental results in ML in the past decade. For example see “dynamical isometry” [1] and the evolution of those ideas which were instrumental in achieving convergence in very deep transformer models [2].
After reading this post and the examples given, in my eyes there is no question that this guy has an extraordinary intuition for optimization, spanning beyond the boundaries of ML and across the fabric of modern society.
We ought to recognize his technical background and raise this discussion above quibbles about semantics and definitions.
Let’s address the heart of his message, the very human and empathetic call to action that stands in the shadow of rapid technological progress:
> If you are a scientist looking for research ideas which are pro-social, and have the potential to create a whole new field, you should consider building formal (mathematical) bridges between results on overfitting in machine learning, and problems in economics, political science, management science, operations research, and elsewhere.
[1] Dynamical Isometry and a Mean Field Theory of CNNs: How to Train 10,000-Layer Vanilla Convolutional Neural Networks
Interesting timing for me! Just a couple of days ago I discovered the work of biologist Olivier Hamant who has been raising exactly this issue. His main thesis is that very high performance (which he defines as efficacy towards a known goal plus efficiency) and very high robustness (the ability to withstand large fluctuations in the system) are physically incompatible. Examples abound in nature. Contrary to common perception evolution does not optimise for high performance but high robustness. Giving priority to performance may have made sense in a world of abundant resources, but we are now facing a very different period where instability is the norm. We must (and will be forced to) backtrack on performance in order to become robust. It’s the freshest and most interesting take on the poly-crisis that I’ve seen in a long time.
I don’t think it’s smart to proactively back track without being very careful. One thing that’s needed is for corporate death to be allowed to occur. Right now the downsides of risky behavior is bailed out for large enough risk. Then the companies that fail aren’t robust and the ones that don’t are but bailouts let non robust companies keep going. Otherwise “robustness” is a property without a measure which means that you’ll get robustness theater where actions are being taken in the name of being robust but it’s not actually making a difference at best and could be making things worse.
As for society itself being robust, it’s a much harder property. Being robust is nice but no one actually wants to live in a metered society where there’s insufficient resources - they’d generally rather kill for resources greedily and let others fail without helping them. That’s why socialized healthcare struggles - while it guarantees a minimum of care for everybody, the care provided has longer wait times and most people are not willing to wait their turn.
In a free market economy we shouldn't demand robustness, we should create a system that promotes and rewards robustness. A strict commitment against bail-outs would certainly be part of that. Companies (and private people) can decide to lower their risk exposure (at the cost of efficiency/profit) or take out insurance against risks. And if they go the insurance route they have to assess how likely their insurance is to go insolvent at the next insurance event. That's how you reward those that are actually resilient.
Healthcare is more complicated. It can never work as an efficient free market since nobody goes comparison shopping for the hospital with the best value-for-money when they have a car crash. That's why socialized healthcare achieves much better results per dollar spent. But it's often hamstrung by attempts at efficiency.
I think a better societal example is disaster relief: helping people back up after they have been hit by a hurricane is the humane thing to do, but how much is that encouraging people to settle in high risk areas with insufficient precautions?
Patients have time to shop for most healthcare services. Only a small fraction of healthcare spending is for emergencies. The highest cost stuff is mostly elective procedures. If you need a colonoscopy or hip replacement then you have time to shop around.
Socialized healthcare has its advantages and is probably more cost effective on average. But we also see affluent Canadians coming to the USA as medical tourists and paying cash for MRI scans in order to avoid the queues back home.
> Patients have time to shop for most healthcare services.
Patients have the time but rarely have the actual ability to shop around outside asking "is this provider in my coverage plan?" They demand me to sign a document stating I'm willing and able to pay while often never being able to actually tell me what the procedure will actually cost. Often, they won't even know that same day the procedure is done, it'll be weeks before I'm actually invoiced. And don't even get me started when you've chosen the surgeon in your plan, the facility in your plan but it turns out the anesthesiologist they scheduled wasn't in your plan. Oops. That's an expensive mistake you made, should have shopped around!
My knee kept locking up and I'd experience tremendous pain. Only once every few weeks though, so I had time to "shop around". I called up several places and tried to get an estimate of what it would cost ahead of actually seeing the doctor. Nobody would actually offer that, they could only make an appointment to see the doctor. No idea what the doctor would actually want to do during that appointment, so who knows what things will cost. Will they want x-rays? Will they want an MRI? Can they do the MRI there? Won't know until you commit to paying!
And out of the few dozen choices of kinesiologists around me which were covered by my insurance few had any appointments available within the next several weeks. Many weren't seeing new patients. So really it was deal with my knee randomly causing me immense pain for several more months or take whoever had the first appointment. And this is in one of the top five largest metro areas in the country, not some small town in the middle of nowhere.
Shopping for which hospital to do the delivery of my children, the estimates for our costs after insurance had a massive amount of uncertainty to the point of being useless. Could be $4k, could be $20k, who knows. Imagine going to a burger joint and the menu says a burger could be anywhere from $1 to $50, we'll invoice you in a month. Go down the street, menu says it could be $3 to $48, we'll invoice you in a few weeks. What an ability to shop around! Free market at work!
> avoid the queues back home.
I already mentioned, most kinesiologists around me were fully booked for months. Very few had anything within several weeks. That's queueing.
I tried to book an appointment with a new dermatologist a few months ago. Once again, in this very large metro area. For dermatologists in my area covered by my insurance, the earliest appointment was six months out. It took several months to get a family member's hip replacement scheduled. We have queues in this country as well.
Getting medical imaging is generally pretty quick and easy though, and places like MRI imaging centers just want to keep moving people through so if they have an empty spot in an afternoon having someone in the machine constantly is important. It's also generally the easiest thing to automate in healthcare; mostly just a matter of getting enough machines and lightly trained techs to rotate people through. Radiologists are often off-site contractors getting paid for every scan they review.
It's unreasonable for you to expect a cost estimate on knee pain. You can ask the provider organization how much they charge for a regular office visit, and then check your coinsurance or copay amount. During the initial office visit the doctor is likely to recommend follow-up tests, imaging scans, medications, and/or physical therapy; you can then ask for price estimates on those additional services.
The No Surprises Act does give patients some protection against high charges for out-of-network services.
> It's unreasonable for you to expect a cost estimate on knee pain
Ok, but then it goes back to this idea of queueing and the "free market". Ok, so it'll take me a few weeks to go to the first doctor just to get his paid estimate. If I don't like whatever estimate he gives (which once again he probably won't directly) what am I to do? Start calling around, make another appointment with someone else several weeks later and pay yet another appointment fee? Hope his prices are better? Rinse and repeat to get a few quotes?
And so continuing the burger example, you call ahead to book a time well in advance and pay $2 just to be able to look at the menu. What a free market.
One of my kids had to get tubes in his ears. I didn't actually get a good faith estimate of cost until that morning in the hospital despite calling several times. I had to schedule, wait weeks, show up early in the morning, and refuse to sign for the financial liability until I got an actual estimate. Free markets at work here guys, totally not a broken system, easily just shop around. And yeah, sure, I could have gone to see a different audiologist and then gone through scheduling it all again and waiting another few months and a couple hundred dollars. After all its just my kid's speech development, no big deal delaying that another month or two (or three).
At least it's good to see this No Surprises Bill solved at least that one example of the healthcare industry screwing people over. Thanks for sharing that.
>private people) can decide to lower their risk exposure
I think the complexities of modern societies make it too difficult to measure this risk adequately. We just don’t have the bandwidth to think about the second-and-third order effects for every social/financial interaction we encounter. And people are generally very poor at estimating high-consequence/low-probability events. This means people will often take very outsized risks without realizing it; when bad things happen it creates an unstable society. I don’t think we’ve evolved to personally manage all the c risks in a large complex society and farming those risks out to institutions seems to be the current way most societies have decided to mitigate those risks.
It also doesn't strike me as very fair. If you smoke, should you not receive cancer care because you took unnecessary risk?
I can see how you could arrive at similar conclusions from a risk management perspective, but it's not a morally just system. Within the system risk taking must be accepted.
Depending on your definition of “fair” this presupposes people are good at estimating risk. The above premise was is based on the fact that they are not. I think there’s a lot of behavioral research that backs that up.
>...farming those risks out to institutions seems to be the current way most societies have decided to mitigate those risks
Unfortunately, those institutions --be they governments, insurance companies, UL Labs, banks, venture capitalists, etc.--also need to be vetted.
Even when staffed with impeccably well credentialed and otherwise highly capable people, their conclusions may be drawn using a different risk framework than your own.
The risk that they mitigate may even be the risk that you won't vote for them, give them money, etc.
There is also the risk of having too little risk, a catastrophe no worse than too much risk. The balloon may not pop, but it may never be filled.
I don’t think anyone reasonable is advocating believing institutions on blind faith (possibly with the exception of religious institutions). They need to be transparent and also strive to reflect the values (risk and otherwise) of their constituents.
That solution is never going to work when black swan events occur on the order of every 5-10 years and executive vision is focused on the next quarter with little concern paid to anything outside the next 2-3 years. Nobody is going to want to give up short term performance to mitigate risks that probably won't manifest until after they've left for a better job.
That solution is how it already works for the vast majority of companies in the US.
“Too big to fail” is a meme that only applied to a tiny handful of companies during the financial crisis. Take a look at SVB for how fast a stalwart huge bank can implode with zero fucks given by the government.
By "zero fucks given by the government" do you mean the government got involved, effectively bought the bank, and took responsibility for 100% of deposits (most of which were the balances of startups, ie venture capital investments)?
Nope, shareholders got wiped out and the bank was done as a bank.
What you’re thinking of is FDIC which is completely the opposite of a bailout for the bank. It’s a bailout for depositors (a huge portion of which were normal people). Arguments for the FDIC protecting people from keeping money in bad banks is a different argument, but it most certainly isn’t a bailout.
If you think going bankrupt and the FDIC seizing your company and wiping out shareholders is a bailout, you don’t know what a bailout is at all. That’s standard bankruptcy with an extra heavy boot on the throat from the government because they are ruthless about maintaining consumer confidence in the banking system.
I didn't say bailout. You said the government gave zero fucks but I think it actually went way above and beyond the normal FDIC insurance to make sure ALL depositors were made whole not just up to the normal 250k.
5-10 years is a perfectly normal investment horizon, and in the end investors are the ones electing the CEO and setting goals and rewards for the executive. If betting on the long term is a winning strategy companies absolutely have the means to do that. But right now it usually isn't.
Yeah, that's the real problem. Too much efficiency in the short term.
My idea on working around this: for any business with actively traded stock there is a salary cap, say $1m/yr *per year*. You want to pay that guy $10m/yr? No, you pay him $1m and he gets 9 sets of shares that are worth $1m now, but they will be delivered one a year. Next year, same thing, you give him $1m, one set of shares from the previous year is delivered to him, he's got 9 new sets coming. So long as you have such shares forthcoming you are not permitted to engage in any trade where you would gain from the stock going down. If you do so inadvertently (say, investing in a fund that shorts the stock) any income from that is taxed at 100%.
The idea is to make your top people care about the long term prospects of the company, not merely the prospects of their area for whatever time they're in charge of it.
Businesses won't plan for black swan events when the people operating them have other sufficient wealth that the death of the company doesn't pose a serious problem for them. When CEOs make enough in a year to retire, there's no need to to worry about a potential catastrophic failure next year.
I don't see why people can't comparisons shop for hospitals before they get in a car crash. Unless I am literally unconscious I would go to the hospital in my area that I trust the most, and I have plans for which urgent care, clinics and hospitals I would take someone else to if they needed a driver.
In fact I think a pretty small fraction of patients arrive at the ER unconscious.
How would develop the "trust" and why would it be correct? How would you diagnose yourself or others before selecting a hospital if those have different trust for different things? How do you balance urgency vs different trust levels if the hospitals are not all the same distance?
It also ignores that huge swaths of the country have no choice at all and the only hospital within a hundred miles is only viable due to huge Federal subsidies. We’ve been helping a close family member navigate that scenario and sure, he could vote with his dollars but it would involve a three hour drive to a neighboring state for an 80-yr old. I’d rather just enforce minimum quality standards on everyone like most other civilized countries rather then relying on “the free market” which so far in my experience has just led to PE goliaths swallowing entire health systems to focus on bill collection and union busting.
CMS does enforce minimum clinical quality standards on hospitals (at least those that accept Medicare). The problems in areas without meaningful competition tend to be more around shortages of qualified practitioners, high prices, and abusive billing policies.
edit: didn't realize I was feeding a troll. Feel free to ignore.
I expect the objections are in how quality is measured and enforced.
It reminds me of education system in the US - most people (project 2025 aside) think it's good to have a public education system; having a pipeline of skilled workers makes it easier to build an economy filled with a diverse set of businesses.
However, the attacks start to fly when there is disagreement about who should be allowed to teach, how they should be measured, and how they should be paid.
Just to be clear: You're asserting that the average citizen
* has the same capacity to research an unknown number of medical procedures and the doctors performing them as they do researching onion prices or CPU specs
* faces a similar scale of consequences when failing to properly analyze medical procedures as they do when they fail to properly price-compare onions or PC services
* has the same freedom of choice to "purchase their preference" in an emergency, life-threatening situation as they have when shopping for PCs or groceries
Dietary and metabolic problems are an epidemic that outweights malpractice in terms of quality and quantity of life by more than two orders of magnitude - so yes, I am saying people face "shopping problems" of life or death magnitude every day.
I've never needed a medical diagnosis to decide between calling my GP and going to an urgent care. It's just a bit surreal to hear everyone else say my ordinary survival skills are impossible and more than could be asked of anybody!
You said you have a hospital selected you trust (by whatever your metric is). Hospitals tend not be all equal for all things, so trust should probably be differential - how do you assess yourself as a patient then to decide on where to go? And if you do not differentiate the trust any further than to a single hospital regardless of what the issue is: why is that sufficient?
I think it is fine to have some preferences for a hospital, but not sure how much benefit that confers outside of some narrow situations.
Sinply replace hospital with any other service, take your own answers and then translate it back. In economic terms I researched medical facilities until the expected marginal benefit of the information fell below the marginal cost. There are a lot of reasons to reform the US healthcare system but you can't argue that consumer choice is too complex to be realized.
The usual cycle for business in a free market is it appears young and fresh, lacking any parasites. It grows rapidly, displacing existing mature businesses. Then, it accumulates bureaucracy and parasites, becoming less and less efficient, strangled by bloat and inability to adapt, and slides into bankruptcy, replaced by the next generation of new businesses. The remains of the business are then reallocated to the next generation of businesses.
(This is quite unlike the common view that businesses inevitably grow to take over the world.)
I.e. business is much like a living organism.
Problems set in when the government bails out failing businesses.
Even worse are government "businesses". They are not allowed to fail, and the inefficiencies, parasites, corruption, grow and grow. When can you remember a government agency being abolished? Eventually, the government will collapse.
Not just government agencies. Everybody wants their finger in the pie to justify their job. And every politician wants to do things their voters like.
I'm thinking of a reasonably recent article I saw that was talking about helping people navigate the 30+ assistance programs they might be eligible for. There's your problem right there--there should not be 30+ programs doing approximately the same thing! That's an awful lot of duplication of effort.
Or look at what happens with business licenses. Two things I see:
1) They want their $ from entities that shouldn't really be "businesses" in the first place. Around here an awful lot of licensed professionals have to have a "business" license--never mind that the nature of their work means they're inside some other entity that actually is reasonable to license. And that means a sales tax registration which has an annual minimum that such people almost certainly will never reach. (Sales tax includes use tax--but it's their office that actually engages in such transactions.)
2) Businesses that perform their work on-site have to have business licenses for every license area of the metropolitan area they work in. Hey, guys, get together and define the superset of the rules of your area and allow someone to get a license that covers the whole area based on that superset.
The Republicans are "right" in that we have far too many regulations. But they are very wrong in wanting to take an axe to them--most of the rules are individually sensible (and when they produce nonsense it's often situations where it's not worthwhile to special case), there is a horrible problem of duplication of effort and fingers in the pie. It's not chopping that's needed, it's organization.
> Even worse are government "businesses". They are not allowed to fail, and the inefficiencies, parasites, corruption, grow and grow. When can you remember a government agency being abolished?
In Commonwealth countries and the UK itself there are plenty of businesses called “crown corporations” which are owned by the government. Change in attitudes towards more liberalism led governments to deregulation and selling off bits and pieces or the entire corporation. Here are some Canadian examples:
America is a relatively young country and has very peculiar philosophies sometimes not found in the rest of the world. Be very careful extrapolating an American perspective abroad or as capturing some elemental truth of the universe.
The problem with this is principal-agent problems. The owners of the business don't want it to fail. The people working there want to make money. They generally live their life and enjoy what money they make before the chickens come home to roost. It can be hard for the owners to realize the business is fragile before that fragility becomes apparent. In the mean time the people running the business made a bunch of money, potentially jumped to other jobs or retired or died.
And the owners could have sold when the business was propped up by unknown fragility.
Human lives are too short for these kinds of feedback loops to be all that effective.
One of the primary reasons people bail out companies are the knock-on effects. People losing jobs, etc. If society itself is robust enough to cover for people in those situations, we could let companies fail far more.
There's a sentiment on here often that, even if a company has been essentially blown up by technology or market change, they should have transformed themselves to adapt. But that implies they probably needed to rototill their workforce in any case. At some point, you're probably better off just declaring bankruptcy and starting fresh or letting someone else do so.
True, but for some companies there are also national security concerns. If we lose the domestic supply chain for certain items then that limits our freedom of action and leaves us vulnerable to supply disruptions.
If you depend on a single company to supply certain items, you have a big problem already. Pouring money in that company will mostly help the executive bonuses, not the national security.
I would love to see a good proof that it works, all the discussions, rumors and anecdotal evidence suggest the contrary. I am open to learn the truth, with hard numbers.
Very long waiting times are the first thing that comes to mind regarding such failures, with UK and Canada at the top spot. It is not uncommon to die waiting for a consultation to be diagnosed in 1-2 years.
What do you wanna good proof of?
Life expectancy? What population health metrics do you want?
Almost all EU countries with socialized healthcare beat US and even UK. Canada is more near EU level.
Do you also want US anedoctal evidence?
What’s the consultation time for diagnose in the US for people without insurance/ insurance doesn’t cover/insurance says it doesn’t cover/no money??
Never?
How does that affect the average/mean?
Life Expectancy:
Italy 83.7;
Spain 83.7;
France 83.3;
Sweden 83.3;
Canada 82.6;
Portugal 82.4;
Germany 81.4;
United Kingdom 81.3;
United States 79.3;
Poland 78.6;
Sometimes insufficient capacity and long wait times can be the result of a government's agenda.
Here in BC, we have (mandatory) auto insurance provided by a crown corporation with a monopoly. The neo-liberal government before the current more socialist leadership hated it and wanted desperately to privatize car insurance. The problem is that ICBC is dearly loved by most residents here. There is a playbook for this problem.
They appointed a fairly incompetent civil servant to run things, and also started raiding the fund, to the tune of billions of dollars.
After about a decade of this, the company was a mess and nearly broke. They were forced to raise rates. The premier characterized the situation as a "dumpster fire" and editorials started popping up arguing for privatization.
That government was defeated, and the new leadership sorted it all out. Within a couple of years, drivers in BC were getting cheques in the mail because ICBC was making too much profit.
There are powerful interests very interested in getting a piece of healthcare in Canada, and some of the shenanigans you see here smell a lot like a set-up to make things become broken enough that the voters will demand privatization.
Just for one example, in the last few years staffing agencies have been hiring away nurses by offering higher wages and then contracting them back to the health authorities at ~$130/hr. This has cost billions to taxpayers and lead to great resentment within the regular staff.
We've seen this during the COVID pandemic supply chain disruptions as well, where just in time supply chain management doesn't work as expected when operating in an abnormal environment.
I'd always thought this conclusion was just a given.
Highly optimized systems take full advantage of their environment and rely on a high degree of predictability in order to avoid redundant operations.
These systems minimize the free energy in the system, and so very little free energy is available to counteract new forces introduced to the environment which act on the system.
You'll find parallels in countless domains, since the very basis for learning and stabilization of a system revolves around becoming more or less sensitive to a given stimulus. Examples could be attention, supply chain economics, institutions, etc.
I was gonna come here to say that, especially how there was a shortage on toilet paper. I remember reading it was becuase factories were so efficient that when people started using the toilet at home instead of the office, it was hard to switch the factories from making commercial to residential toilet paper. I think someone even made the pun of paper-thin margins.
It's not just Covid. Look at the medical world. Generic products compete on price and there is little profit margin--not enough to warrant overprovisioning against problems. And meeting FDA requirements for new activities means new players can't just jump in the game. (And we sometimes see this done maliciously--control all active production of something and shove the price through the roof.) One factory has a problem and there can be huge problems downstream as a result.
The only solution I see is for the FDA to include supply reliability in it's determination of whether a system is acceptable.
Unedited bullet points on a related topic (same prefixes are linear, different prefixes connect to the others, but I haven't decided where yet):
>capital concentration increases
>expectations for what capital owners can do with money increases
>expectations exceed available capital
>investment returns must increase (race to the top)
>cooperation among capital owners must increase to get better returns
>capital owning group begins to self-select and become less diverse, if this wasn't already caused by the background/personality required to accrue capital
>investment theory converges on a handful of "winning" ventures
>because this is where capital is flowing, workers are forced to divert to these ventures
His main thesis is that very high performance (which he defines as efficacy towards a known goal plus efficiency) and very high robustness (the ability to withstand large fluctuations in the system) are physically incompatible.
…what about humans? We’re far more efficacious than any other animal, and far more capable of behavioral adaptation.
Plus, isn’t “physically impossible” a computer science argument, not a biological one? Unless we’re using the OG “physis”==“nature”, I guess
I don't know that the poly-crisis is bit this does feel timely.
I know I'd tolerate a digital experience of far lower fidelity (fewer pixels, for instance, or even giving up GUIs altogether) if I could get it in a way that doesn't break every time some far away person farts near a cloud console: A trade of performance for robustness.
There are also a lot of engineering examples where the goal is to optimize for reliability. I think the most common domain is marine platforms where it is prohibitively expensive to induct and repair (you have to send a team out by helicopter, for example).
And yet most large merchant ships are designed with a single engine, propeller, and rudder to optimize for cost instead of reliability. We have seen some spectacular failures of that approach recently, although it probably still makes sense in aggregate.
A major mechanical casualty beyond what the crew can repair usually means a tow to a shipyard. Flying more engineers in by helicopter would seldom help, and often isn't feasible.
This is true, but different than the maritime platforms I was talking about. The ones that tend to focus on reliability-centered optimization are platforms used for drilling, not transport. Even then, you will see instances where they decide to optimize for cost/schedule (eg Deepwater Horizon). IMO, that is a company-cultural issue.
Btw- reliability optimization doesn’t necessarily mean it is optimized to not fail. They are optimized to fail within some predetermined risk level. What that risk level should be is an entirely different discussion.
The bridge that collapsed wasn't due to a single engine, propeller or rudder. It was due to a single electrical system. One intermittent electrical issue left the ship basically helpless even though all propulsion and steering was undamaged.
To a first approximation, humans have never lived in a world of abundant resources. That has mostly only applied to a minority of affluent people in developed countries. But resource abundance continues to improve on average worldwide.
Giving priority to performance may have made sense in a world of abundant resources, but we are now facing a very different period where instability is the norm.
Your sound system has a volume dial to turn up and down the gain of the track even though you could get the same effect by re-recording the track at a higher volume; isn’t that curious?
>> If you are a scientist looking for research ideas which are pro-social, and have the potential to create a whole new field, you should consider building formal (mathematical) bridges between results on overfitting in machine learning, and problems in economics, political science, management science, operations research, and elsewhere.
Translation to laymen: ML is being analogized to the mathematical structure of signaling between entities and institutions in society.
Mathematician proposes problem that plagues one (overfitting in ML, the phenomena by which a neural network's ability to generalize is negatively impacted by overtraining so the functions it can emulate are tightly coupled to the training data), must plague the other.
In short, there must be a breakdown point at which overdevelopment of societal systems or signaling between them makes things simply worse.
I personally think all one need do is look at what would happen if every system were perfectly complied with to see we may already be well beyond that breakpoint in several industrial verticals.
The exciting thing about this idea is if you can correlate, say, economics with the works of ML, that means a computer program which you can run, revise and alter can directly give you measurable data about these complex system interactions that mostly have existed as a platonic idea since reality is too nuanced and multiple to validate concepts formally.
With the idea that there is some subset of logic that sits below economics that is provable and exact. That is a powerful idea worth pursuing!
This idea has been pursued several times in the past, and it always ends up producing lots of interesting academic results and no practical conclusions.
It's certainly an interesting perspective on the development of complex systems. The idea that an economy can be somehow overfitted to its own incentives and constraints I don't think is entirely new, cf the Beer Game. But as a general concept, it's certainly not something that usually finds its way into policy discussion, beyond some very specific talk about reshoring of certain critical industries.
However, I think the most important benefit of this perspective is going to be providing yet another counterargument against the Austrian economics death cult.
It seems to me that something similar to Adam Smith happened to the Austrians: their ideas have been cherry-picked. According to German Wikipedia, their main things were / are a focus on individual preferences, marginal utility, and a rejection of mathematical modeling(!)
There was also something about lower state expenditures (...taxes...) giving better results for the people - that's the one that seems to be very popular with rich people for some reason. Go figure.
Austrian economics also rejects empirical assesment of its claims. Instead, universal thruths are derived "logically" (formal logic banned though) from "obviously true" axioms using a method called praxeology.
It seems a lot like Scientology: the more you learn about it, the more bizarre it gets. And of course it's used to extract a lot of money for few benefactors.
Well if you can turn chatgpt into an intelligent actor in a simulated economy, and are able to run it at scale, I bet you can get some valuable insights.
Brilliant enough to know he's helping build another atom bomb (presumably for peanuts)? And the nuclear briefcase is gonna be controlled by the ultrarich.
The argument rides on the well-known Goodhart's law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure). However, it only puts it down to measurement problems, as in, we can't measure the things we really care about, so we optimize some proxies.
That, in my view, is a far too reductionist view of the problem. The problem isn't just about measurement, it's about human behavior. Unlike particles, humans will actively seek to exploit any control system you've set up. This problem goes much deeper than just not being able to measure "peace, love, puppies" well. There's a similar adage called Campbell's law [0] that I think captures this better than the classic formulation of Goodhart's law:
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
The mitigants proposed (regularization, early stopping) address this indirectly at best and at worst may introduce new quirks that can be exploited through undesired behavior.
> Unlike particles, humans will actively seek to exploit any control system you've set up.
But that’s only possible because the control system doesn’t exactly (and only) control what we want it to control. The control system is only an imperfect proxy for what we really want, in a very similar way as the measure in Goodhart’s law.
Another variation of that is the law of unintended consequences [0]. There is probably a generalized computational or complex-systems version of it that we haven’t discovered yet.
Disagree. Even if it was striving to regulate exactly the right thing in the first place, most of these issues occur for systems where no single actor could be expected to exert complete control and could well be vulnerable anyway.
Start working with a nice, clean, fully relevant system, end up modelling that plus the whole range of adversarial perturbations from agents of pretty high complexity.
> Unlike particles, humans will actively seek to exploit any control system you've set up.
Well, agents will. If you created a genetic algorithm for an AI agent whose reward function was the amount of dead cobras it got from Delhi, I feel like you'd quickly find that the best performing agent was the one that started breeding cobras. In the human case and in the AI case the reward function has been hacked. In the AI case we decide that the reward function wasn't designed well, but in the human case we decide that the agents are sneaky petes who have a low moral character and "exploited" the system.
We have good reason to treat the humans as sneaky in your example, because they understand the spirit of the control system, and exploit the letter of it. The AI only understands the letter.
I think a big portion of that is humans don’t like to be viewed only as numbers and will rebel and manipulate any system you try to put the thumbscrews to them with. So the quote to mean rings golden and isn’t fallible to much of an extent
This is true, these "laws" are approximations and imperfect reductions.
Which one is useful or descriptive will depend on the specific example.
Optimizing ML VS Optimizing a social media algorithm VS using standardized testing to optimize education systems.
There is no perfect abstraction that applies to these different scenarios precisely. We don't need that precision. We just need the subsequent intuition about where these things will go wrong.
I missed the citation on his education point. Has someone proved that “teaching to the test” leads to lower educational outcomes than not having tests?
IDK. I don't think we can actually have a discussion about education where all statements are supported by indisputable evidence.
There do happen to be citations for this question but I doubt any really clears an "indisputable evidence" standard. That's the nature of the field. Even if the whole discussion was evidence based and dotted with citations, we'd still be working with a lot of intuition and speculation.
Not a citation, but I believe it's a mediocritizing measure. For some teachers and some students, teaching to the test is probably better. I suspect more heavily concentrated in the bottom 50% of each group. For a subset of great teachers and great students, it's a detriment.
I saw some professors share the least about their tests to make sure we truly understand the material, sounds to me like a real-life usage of a train/test split. It’s not far fetched to think they employed this technique because teaching to the test didn’t work well by itself.
This has become a societal problem in Sweden during the past 20 or so years.
1: Healthcare efficiency is measured by "completed tasks" by primary care doctors, the apparatus is optimized for them handling simple cases and they thus often do some superficial checking and either send one home with some statistically correct medicine (aspirin/antibiotics) or punt away cases to a specialized doctor if it appears to be something more complicated.
The problem is that since there's now fewer of them (efficient) they've more or less assembly line workers and have totally lost the personal "touch" with patients that would give them an indication on when something is wrong. Thus cancers,etc are very often diagnosed too late so even if specialized cancer care is better, it's often too late to do anything anyhow.
2: The railway system was privatized, considering the amount of cargo shipped it's probably been a huge success but the system is plagued by delays due to little gaps in the system to allow late trains to speed up or to even do more than basic maintenance (leading to bigger issues).
There are examples everywhere. To quote Steve Jobs;
>When a company grows big enough, they want to replicate their initial success. They all thought about the "process" of how the first success was created. So they replicate those "process" across the company. And before very long the people confused that the process was the content.
And you can fit that from small companies to the world's largest government. Most of them forgot about their content.
Another example of this approximate law is in exercise physiology.
To a normal person, there are a lot of good proxy indicators of fitness. You could train sprinting. You could hop up and down. Squat. Clean and jerk.. etc.
Running faster,hopping higher, squatting heavier... all indicators of increasing fitness... and success of your fitness training.
Two points:
1 - The more general your training methodology, the more meaningful the indicators. Ie, if your fitness measure is "can I push a car uphill," and your training method is sprinting and swimming... pushing a heavier car is a really strong indicator of success. If your training method is "practice pushing a car," then an equivalent improvement does not indicate equivalent improvement in fitness.
2- As an athlete (say clean and jerk) becomes more specialized... improvements in performance become less indicative of general fitness. Going from zero to "recreational weighlifter" involves getting generally stronger and musclier. Going from college to olympic level... that typically involves highly specialized fitness attributes that don't cross into other endeavors.
Another metaphor might be "base vs peak" fitness, from sports. Accidentaly training for (unsustainable) peak performance is another over-optimization pitfall. It can happen when someone blindly follows "line go up." Illusary optimizations are actually just trapping you in a local maxima.
I think there are a lot of analogies here to biology, but also ML optimization and social phenomenon.
Clean & jerk is one of those movements that I would almost consider "complete". Especially if you are going to mix in variants of the squat.
Not sure these are the best example. I don't know of anyone who can C&J more than their body weight for multiple repetitions who isn't also an absolute terminator at most other meaningful aspects of human fitness.
Human body is one machine. Hormonal responses are global. Endurance/strength is a spectrum but the whole body goes along for the ride.
Perhaps. And you could probably test this but I would gamble that the principle still applies. IE, these weightlifters are probably also very capable (eg) shotputters because of all that weightlifting. But also... their shotput, sprinting and other tangential abilities probably peak at some point. From then on, they are mostly just getting stronger at clean and jerk.
> Hormonal responses are global. Endurance/strength is a spectrum but the whole body goes along for the ride.
This is true, and that is why most exercise is a general good for most people, and has similar physiological effects. However, at some point "specialization" (term of art), kicks in. At that point, a bigger clean and jerk no longer equates to a longer shot put.
Fwiw... This isn't a point about exercise or how to exercise. Most people aren't that specialized or advanced in a sport and the ones who are have coaches. My point is that the phenomenon speculated to be broad in this post applies (I suspect) to physiology. Probably quite broadly. It's just easy to think about it in terms of sports because "training & optimization" directly apply.
I agree with your overall point, but also the person you’re replying to. I think that clean and jerk may be the example that least supports your argument. If I had to optimize an athlete for one movement and then test them on 20, C&J would probably be my pick. Bench press would be lower down the list.
This isn’t just nit picking exercises here. There are some measures to optimize for that lead to broader performance. They tend to be more complex and test all components of the system.
IMO deadlift is another good one. If you could only do a single lift, I think you could make a pretty good case that it should be deadlift. Works damn near every muscle in your body, and gets your heart going pretty good too.
I think that's more an indication that "general fitness" is not a rigorous metric. It's fine as a vague notion of "physical ability" up to a point, and past that it loses meaning because improvements in ability are task-specific and no longer translate to other tasks.
Those are great points! Another related law is from queuing theory: waiting time goes to infinity when utilization approaches 100%. You need your processes/machines/engineers to have some slack otherwise some tasks will wait forever.
I’m remembering reading once that cities are incredibly efficient in how they use resources (compared to the suburbs and rural areas, I guess), and, in light of your comment about waiting time, I’m realizing why now why they’re so unpleasant: constant resource contention.
Sorry to put it so bluntly, but you're basically saying:
"I don't care it the climate's fucked, I want to live away from civilization and drive 100 miles a day everywhere"
Of course we shouldn't hyper-optimize everything, but sooner people realize our environment depends on not everyone getting exactly what they want whenever they want the better. Living in a (walkable) city is just one such concession towards the environment we ought to make, even if we don't "want" to.
Or we can stop acting like there’s only two options: living in wide-open fields with a clear horizon or the fucking walled city of Kowloon.
Also, you have the mindset of a typical anti-social coastal elite who thinks “oh no big deal we can just raise the cost of living for all the poor rural types by sticking on a tax because I want to go LARP as a Victorian manor lord. And people don’t bend to my every whim immediately or live exactly like me so I want to be in total control of the 50 miles around me.”
All I'm saying is that the efficiency arguments are silly unless you are comparing like for like. If we're suggesting that people simply do less because it's more efficient, well, no-one is going to do that without an incentive.
Everyone having 50 sqmi obviously isn't realistic (there actually is not enough space on the globe), but equally, if the idea is that everyone _has_ to live in a metropolitan apartment because each person has to use (1/7billion) of the resources, you're going to see an uprising, that just won't fly with people.
The best outcome is probably to convince as many people as possible to live in a shoebox so that the rest of us can still have a decent life. It seems to be working!
We're already competing under capitalism, and clearly the end-state isn't who'll get the most of what we already have, but who'll get the most of what's yet to get exploited. This competition doesn't have any upper bounds.
That’s not remotely what I’m saying. I live in a city and don’t drive most days because I can walk and take public transit and there’s never any parking. What I’m saying is that in the bigger picture, approaching life as a set of problems to be optimized is the wrong way to approach life.
On the other hand, in cities people are queueing up and talking at the bakery counter. While people in the suburbs are listening to the radio while driving to the bakery. I guess you choose to live where you feel most comfortable.
It allows for a greater variety of things (museums, concerts, etc.), but to get that you have to deal with higher contention and, thus, costs across all things (whether in terms of time spent waiting or money spent outbidding others), including, crucially, the things you consume the most of (roads, housing, etc.). So maybe a good way to think about it is: if you have a lifestyle that requires a modest amount of most resources, then the variety provided by density may be worth the increased resource contention, but if you have a lifestyle that requires a lot of certain resources (like space for kids), then the tradeoff may no longer make sense.
Right, but if I had 1 hour in NYC versus 1 hour in LA how many clubs could I theoretically go to? Probably a dozen in NYC, provided I leave immediately. Probably about .5 in LA.
So while what you're saying is true, it doesn't disprove anything. LA is much less dense and therefore has much less "stuff" available for its inhabitants. But it's still more than a rural area.
Yep, I used to work in a factory. Target utilization at planning time was 80%. If you over-predict your utilization, you waste money. If you under-predict, a giant queue of “not important” stuff starts to develop
This reminds me of something my mother told me she aimed for when she ran her catering businesses: she always wanted 1 serving of pie leftover at the end of every day.
If she had 0, she ran the risk of turning customers away and losing money. Any more than 1 is excess waste. Having just 1 meant she’d served every possible customer and only “wasted” 1 slice.
For some scenarios that's fine, and you can slash the queue whenever necessary.
Eg at Google (this was ten years ago or so), we could always spend leftover networking capacity on syncing a tiny bit faster and more often between our data centres. And that would improve users' experience slightly, but it also not something that builds up a backlog.
At a factory, you could always have some idle workers swipe the floor a bit more often. (Just a silly example, but there are probably some tasks like that?)
Unlike merchantmen, naval vessels were crewed at a level allowing for substantial attrition (bad attrition would be casualties; good attrition would be prize crews); I believe they traditionally (pace Churchill) had many, many activities which were incidental to force projection (eg polishing the brightwork) but could be used to occupy all hands.
I feel that a 100% efficient system is not resilient. Even minor disruptions in subsystems lead to major breakdowns.
There’s no room to absorb shocks. We saw a drastic version of this during COVID-19 induced supply chain collapse. Car manufacturers had built near 100% just in time manufacturing that they couldn’t absorb chip shortages and it took them years to get back up.
It also leaves no room for experimentation. Whatever experiment can only happen outside a system not from within it.
This is coincides with my headcannon cause of the business cycle.
1. Firms compete
2. Firms either increase their efficiency or die
3. Efficient firms are more susceptible to shocks
4. Firm shutdown and closures are themselves shocks
5. Eventually the system reaches a critical point where the aggregate susceptibility is higher than the aggregate of shocks that will be generated by shutdowns and closures
6. Any external shock will cause a cascade
There's essentially a "commons" where firms trade susceptibility for efficiency. Or in other words, susceptibility is pooled while the rewards for efficiency are separate.
It has inevitability, but you're right, not predictable periodicity. Is predictable periodicity a necessary part of a cycle? I feel like the rise and fall of nations is a cycle, but not necessarily one of predictable periodicity.
There is a fundamental tension between efficiency and resilience, you are completely correct. And yea, it’s a systems problem, not limited to tech.
There is an odd corollary, which is that capitalistic systems which reward efficiency gains and put downward pressure to incentivize efficiency, deal with the resilience problem by creating entirely new subsystems rather than having more robust subsystems, which is fundamentally inefficient.
This is exactly the subthread of this conversation I’m interested in.
Is what you’re saying that capitalism breaks down resilience problems into efficiency problems?
I think that’s an extremely motivating line of thinking, but I’ll have to do some head scratching to figure out exactly what to make of it. On one hand, I think capitalism is really good at resilience problems (efficient markets breed resilience, there’s always an incentive to solve a market inefficiency), on the other (or perhaps in light of that) I’m not so sure those two concepts are so dialectically opposed
To understand the effects, we first have to take a step back and recognize that efficiency and resiliency problems are both subsets of optimization problems. Efficiency is concerned with maximizing the ratio of inputs to outputs, and resiliency is concerned with minimizing risk.
The fundamental tension arises because risk mitigation increases input costs. Over a given time horizon, there is an optimal amount of risk mitigation that will result in maximum aggregate profit (output minus input, not necessarily monetary). The longer the time horizon, the more additional risk mitigation is required, to prevent things like ruin risk.
But here’s the rub: competition reduces the time horizon to “very very short” because it drives down the output value. So in a highly competitive market, we see companies ignore resiliency (they cannot afford to invest in it) and instead they get lucky until they don’t (another force at work here is lack of skin in the game). The market deals with this by replacing them with another firm that has not yet been subject to the ruinous risks of the previous firm. This cycle repeats again and again.
Most resilient firms have some amount of monopolistic stickiness that allows them to invest more in resiliency, but it is also easy to look at those firms and see they are highly inefficient.
The point is that the cycle of firms has a cost, and it is not a trivial one: capital gets reallocated, businesses as legal entities are created, sold, and destroyed, contracts have to be figured out again, supply chains are disrupted, etc. Often, the most efficient outcome for the system is if the firms had been more resilient.
So there is an inefficient Nash equilibrium present in those sort of competitive markets.
That’s a good clarification about firms vs. the broader system. I think that’s a pretty good breakdown, overall, and fits well with the general notion that capitalism is resilient, not efficient, by offloading efficiency onto smaller entities which are efficient, not resilient. You could compare to command economies where a firm failure is basically a failure of the state, and can destabilize the future of the entire system.
There was a sci-fi series I read (I want to say by Alastair Reynolds) which talked about planet-bound civilisations having an innate boom-and-bust cycle where the civilisation would inevitably get more and more efficient at utilising resources, while thereby becoming more fragile and susceptible to system shocks. It would then collapse and eventually the survivors would rebuild.
You can add a measure of robustness to your optimization criteria. You can explicitly optimise for having enough slack in your utilisation to handle these unforeseen circumstances.
For example, you can assign priorities to the loads on your systems, so that you can shed lower priority loads to create some slack for emergencies, without having to run your system idle under during lulls.
I get what the article is trying to say, but they shouldn't write off optimisation as easily as that.
The problem is that people who agree to a task being low priority still expect it to be done in nine months and all of a sudden they become high priority if that doesn’t happen.
So you’re fixing the micro economics of the queue but not the macro. Queues still suck when they fill up, even if they fill with last minute jobs.
This totally depends on the system in question and what the agreements with your users are.
Eg if you are running video conferencing software, and all of a sudden you are having bandwidth problems, you typically first want to drop some finer details in the video, and then you want to drop the audio feed.
In any case, if you dropped something, you leave it dropped, instead of picking it back up again a few seconds later. People don't care about past frames.
(However, queuing instead of outright dropping can still makes sense in this scenario, for any information that's younger than what human reaction times can perceive.)
Similarly in your scenario, you'd want to explicitly communicate to people what the expectations are. Perhaps you give out deep discounts for tasks that can be dropped (that's what eg some electriticy providers do), or you can give people 'insurance' where they get some monetary compensation if their task gets dropped. (You'd want to be careful how you design such a scheme, to avoid perverse incentives. But it's all doable.)
> So you’re fixing the micro economics of the queue but not the macro. Queues still suck when they fill up, even if they fill with last minute jobs.
I don't know, I had pretty positive experiences so far when eg I got bumped off a flight due to overbooking. The airline offered decent compensation.
Overbooking and bumping people off _improves_ the macro situation: despite the occasional compensation you have to pay, when unexpectedly everyone who booked actually showed up, overbooking still makes the airline extra money, and via competition this is transformed into lower ticket prices. Many people love lower airfares, and have shown a strong revealed preference of putting up with a lot of stuff eg RyanAir pulls as long as they get cheap tickets.
A task "shed" is one delivered with infinite latency. If that's fine for you then the theorem doesn't hurt you, do what's best for your domain. It's just something to be aware of.
Then you just get Little's law, which is not usually what people want. Preemption is usually considered pretty important... Much like preemptory tasks.
Interesting. My gut reaction is that this is true in reverse: infinite wait time leads to 100% utilization. However, I feel like you can also have 100% utilization with any queue length if input=output. Is that theory just a result of a first order approximation or am I missing something?
That's right, this is true no matter the queue length. If input=output on average, there is no limit on how long your queue will grow, and therefore no limit on how long queued task will wait.
The average queue length is still infinity. Whatever the queue length happens to be at the start, it will stay there, and it could be any positive number up to infinity.
I'm not really disagreeing (as GDP is a crude measure), but rather thinking out loud. I don't think my individual life satisfaction and optimism should be influenced by nation-state economics to the extent that that's what they're optimizing for. The job of my government is to create the conditions for security, prosperity and opportunity without oppressing the rest of the world or destroying the planet. But it's up to me to find a satisfying life within that and that is possible within drastically different economic and social structures. Similarly, there's probably not a set of conditions that gives universal satisfaction to all citizens, so what summary statistics of life satisfaction and optimism do we optimize for?
I find ironic that we are talking about ML where we have vectors of thousands of quantities and then we go to measure social/economic stuff with one (or a couple of numbers).
The general discourse (news, politicians, forums, etc.) over a couple of measures will always be highly simplifying. The discourse over thousands of measures will be too complex to communicate easily.
I hope that at some point most people will acknowledge implicitly that the fewer the number of measures the more probable is that it is a simplification that hides stuff. (ex: "X is a billionaire, means his smart"; "country X has high GDP means it's better than country Y with less GDP" and so forth).
> I hope that at some point most people will acknowledge implicitly that the fewer the number of measures the more probable is that it is a simplification that hides stuff.
But the larger the number of measures, the more free variables you have. Which makes it easier to overfit, either accidentally or maliciously.
> Though planning and worker control are the cornerstones of socialism, overly ambitious planning (the Soviet case) and overly autonomous workplaces (the Yugoslav case) have both failed as models of socialism. Nor do moderate reforms to those models, whether imagined or applied, inspire. With all-encompassing planning neither effective nor desirable, and decentralization to workplace collectives resulting in structures too economically fragmented to identify the social interest and too politically fragmented to influence the plan, the challenge is: what transformations in the state, the plan, workplaces, and the relations among them might solve this quandary?
> The operating units of both capitalism and socialism are workplaces. Under capitalism, these are part of competing units of capital, the primary structures that give capitalism its name. With socialism’s exclusion of such private units of self-expansion, the workplace collectives are instead embedded in pragmatically constituted “sectors,” defined loosely in terms of common technologies, outputs, services, or simply past history. These sectors are, in effect, the most important units of economic planning and have generally been housed within state ministries or departments such as Mining, Machinery, Health Care, Education, or Transportation Services. These powerful ministries consolidate the centralized power of the state and its central planning board. Whether or not this institutional setup tries to favor workers’ needs, it doesn’t bring the worker control championed by socialists. Adding liberal political freedoms (transparency, free press, freedom of association, habeas corpus, contested elections) would certainly be positive; it might even be argued that liberal institutions should flourish best on the egalitarian soil of socialism. But as in capitalism, such liberal freedoms are too thin to check centralized economic power. As for workplace collectives, they are too fragmented to fill the void. Moreover, as noted earlier, directives from above or competitive market pressures limit substantive worker control even withinthe collectives.
> A radical innovation this invites is the devolution of the ministries’ planning authority and capacities out of the state and into civil society. The former ministries would then be reorganized as “sectoral councils” — structures constitutionally sanctioned but standing outside the state and governed by worker representatives elected from each workplace in the respective sector. The central planning board would still allocate funds to each sector according to national priorities, but the consolidation of workplace power at sectoral levels would have two dramatic consequences. First, unlike liberal reforms or pressures from fragmented workplaces, such a shift in the balance of power between the state and workers (the plan and worker collectives) carries the material potential for workers to modify if not curb the power that the social oligarchy has by virtue of its material influence over the planning apparatus, from information gathering through to implementation as well as the privileges they gain for themselves. Second, the sectoral councils would have the capacity, and authority from the workplaces in their jurisdiction, to deal with the “market problem” in ways more consistent with socialism.
> Key here is a particular balance between incentives, which increase inequality, and an egalitarian bias in investment. As noted earlier, the surpluses earned by each workplace collective can be used to increase their communal or individual consumption, but those surpluses cannot be used for reinvestment. Nationwide priorities are established at the level of the central plan through democratic processes and pressures (more on this later) and these are translated into investment allocations by sector. The sector councils then distribute funds for investment among the workplace collectives they oversee. But unlike market-based decisions, the dominant criteria are not to favor those workplaces that have been most productive, serving to reproduce permanent and growing disparities among workplaces. Rather, the investment strategy is based on bringing the productivity of goods or services of the weaker collectives closer to the best performers (as well as other social criteria like absorbing new entrants into the workforce and supporting development in certain communities or regions).
...
> No one paid greater economic homage to capitalism than the authors of The Communist Manifesto, marveling that capitalism “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.” Yet far from seeing this as representing the pinnacle of history, Marx and Engels identified this as speaking to a new and broader possibility: capitalism was “the first to show what man’s activity can bring about.” The task was to build on this potential by explicitly socializing and reorganizing the productive forces.
> In contrast, for Hayek and his earlier mentor von Mises, capitalism was the teleological climax of society, the historical end point of humanity’s tendency to barter. Hayek considered it a truism that that without private property and no labor and capital markets, there would be no way of accessing the latent knowledge of the population, and without pervasive access to such information, any economy would sputter, drift, and waste talent and resources. Von Mises, after his argument that socialism was essentially impossible was decisively swept aside, turned his focus on capitalism’s genius for entrepreneurship and the dynamic efficiency and constant innovation that it brought.
> Despite Hayek’s claims, it is in fact capitalism that systematically blocks the sharing of information. A corollary of private property and profit maximization is that information is a competitive asset that must be hidden from others. For socialism, on the other hand, the active sharing of information is essential to its functioning, something institutionalized in the responsibilities of the sectoral councils. Further, the myopic individualism of Hayek’s position ignores, as Hilary Wainwright has so powerfully argued, the wisdom that comes from informal collective dialogue, often occurring outside of markets in discussions and debates among groups and movements addressing their work and communities.
And for me it was this ingenious 2019 paper co-authored by Stephan Hoyer and Sam Greydanus on doing structural optimization by employing a (constrained) neural network as a storage/modifier/tuner of the physical model describing the structure to optimize: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.04240
Super interesting approach and very well written paper.
This makes me think of going to chain restaurants. Everything has been focus-grouped and optimized and feels exactly like an overfit proxy for an enjoyable meal. I feel like I'm in a bald-faced machine that is optimized to generate profit from my visit. The fact that it's a restaurant feels almost incidental.
"HI! My name is Tracy! I'm going to be your server this evening!" as she flawlessly writes her name upside down in crayon on the paper tablecloth. Woah. I think this place needs to re-calibrate their flair.
I noticed an example of this rule at my local hardware superstore.
Around a decade ago, the store installed anti-theft cages.
At first they only kept high-dollar items in the cages. It was a bit of an inconvenience, but not so bad. If a customer is dropping $200+ on some fancy power tool, he or she likely doesn't mind waiting five minutes.
But a few years later, there was a change - almost certainly a 'data-driven' change: suddenly there was no discernible logic to which items they caged and which they left uncaged. Now a $500 diagnostics tool is as likely to sit open on a shelf, as a $5 light bulb to be kept under lock and key.
Presumably the change is a result of sorting a database by 'shrinkage' - they lock up the items that cumulatively lose the hardware store the most money, due to theft.
But the result is (a) the store atmosphere reads as "so profit-driven they don't trust the customers not to steal a box of toothpicks" and (b) it's often not worth it for customers to shop there due to the waiting around for an attendant to unlock the cage.
I doubt the optimization helped their bottom-line, even if it has prevented the theft of some $3 bars of soap.
It’s much more convenient to buy from Amazon than to try to find someone to unlock a glass case at the pharmacy. Especially since any pharmacy with glass cases for basic items will also be understaffed.
A few of my visits to this hardware store have been... memorable!
(1) locate the aisle with the item I want to verify it is still in stock
(2) spend 5 minutes wandering around the isles looking for a free attendant
(3) give up, press the 'service' button
(4) wait at the service desk for another 5 minutes until an attendant arrives to unlock the cage and hand me my $10 item
(5) have attendant inform me that he must immediately frogmarch me to the nearest self-checkout station, even though I had further items I wanted to buy. Otherwise, I would have a chance to secret the $10 item in my pocket, or to dash for the door?
(6) self-checkout and walk through the parking lot to place the item in my vehicle
(7) walk back to the store to buy my other items
(8) realize one of my other items is also locked in a cage
(9) got back to step (1) and repeat for a second item
I realize, as I type this, that the store has turned into the American equivalent of the British 'catalog merchant' except, in the UK, a catalog store gives you a numbered ticket, so the customer has, at least, a streamlined procedure and knows what to expect.
> they lock up the items that cumulatively lose the hardware store the most money, due to theft.
> I doubt the optimization helped their bottom-line
These seem to be in direct contradiction, unless you really think people have stopped going there because of it, to such an extent it outweighs the thefts. Especially when, if they stop going there, the competing local hardware superstore is probably doing the exact same thing. And remember, retail margins aren't usually huge -- for every item stolen, how many more do they need to sell to recoup the loss? Even if some people go to Amazon instead, it can still be worth it to avoid the theft.
It's much more likely that it has indeed had the biggest impact on reducing theft, and that your "discernable logic" simply doesn't have experience with these things -- that theft often isn't about item value, but rather about reliable resellability. A single expensive niche power tool takes a long time to resell; laundry detergent and razor blades can be unloaded in quantity the same day. People go through detergent and razors a lot faster than light bulbs.
I understand you dislike the inconvenience. But I really think you should be blaming the thieves or the factors behind theft, not the stores.
I doubt the optimization helped their bottom-line; I do not know it.
It is possible for a business to make money without customers actually liking the company: hey, it works for some of the FA*NG companies!
That said, there is something that feels 'off' about management obsessing over shrinkage to the point that the shopping experience begins to suck. It's not a truckstop or a drug store in a bad area... it's a hardware superstore.
With too much data, some manager can fixate on $3 screwdriver thievery and not think about the bigger picture: like shoppers finding the store to be a pain in the ass, and therefore no longer an attractive place to buy expensive riding-lawnmowers and floor jacks.
A store can quantify lower sales figures, but it may not be obvious that the lower sales were related to the choice of 'caged vs uncaged' inventory.
I think it also applies to when managers try to overoptimize work process, in the end creative people lose interest and work becomes unbearable...little chaos is necessary in a work place/life imo...
I kill my desire to work on a lot of side projects by trying to over optimize the parts I’m not going to like doing. I should just do the yucky parts and get past them. But at least nobody is paying me to spiral.
Calling this the "strong version of Goodhart's law" was immediately brain-expanding for me.
I have been thinking of goodhart's law a lot, but realized I had been leaning toward focusing on human reaction to the metric as the cause of it; but this reminded me it's actually fundamentally about the fact that any metric itself is inherently not an exact representation of the quality you wish to represent.
And that this may, as OP argues, make goodhart's law fundamental to pretty much any metric used as a target. Independently of how well-intentioned any actors. It's not a result of like human laziness or greed or competing interests, it's an epistemic (?) result of the neccesary imperfection of metric validity.
This makes some of OP's more contentious "Inject noise into the system" and "early stopping" ideas more interesting even for social targets.
"The more our social systems break due to the strong version of Goodhart's law, the less we will be able to take the concerted rational action required to fix them."
Parallel to Munger’s “Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome” which I think all of us have or will realize for ourselves at some point in life.
Strictly speaking this is not the contrapositive and therefore the proof is yet to be seen. A sound corollary: "If I do not behave, it is because you did not measure me."
Yes, a corollary can be just the contrapositive of something you just proved. Sometimes it's even more trivial, like a special case of a general theorem you proved.
A very common use is to re-state something so it's in the exact form of something you said you'd prove. Another common case is to highlight a nice incidental result that's a bit outside the path towards the main result -- for example, it immediately follows (perhaps logically equivalent to) something that's been proven, but it's dressed in a way that catches the attention of someone who's just skimming.
It's an effect that exists, but the examples aren't accurate.
An overemphasis on grades isn't from wanting to educate the population; obesity isn't from prioritizing nutrient-rich food; and increased inequality isn't from wanting to distribute resources based on the needs of society.
Living a well-lived life through culture, cooking, or exercise doesn't make you more susceptible to sensationalism, addiction, or gambling. It's a lack of stimulus that makes you reach for those things.
You can argue that academia enables rankings, industrial food production enables producing empty calories, and economic development enables greater inequality. But that isn't causation.
It also isn't a side effect when significant resources specifically go into promoting education as a private matter best used to educate the elite, that businesses aren't responsible for the externalities they cause, and that resources should be privately controlled.
In many ways, it is far easier to have more public education, heavily tax substances like sugar, and redistribute wealth than it is to do anything else. That just isn't the goal. It used to be hard to get a good education, good food, and a good standard of living. And it still is. For the same reasons.
When it comes to his Mitigation: Inject noise into the system. proposal: I would be happy to experiment with some sortition in our political systems. Citizens' assemblies et cetera.
Randomly chosen deliberative bodies could keep some of the stupid polarization in check, especially if your chances to be chosen twice into the same body are infinetesimal.
We tend to consider "democracy" as fundamentally equivalent to "free and fair elections", but sortition would be another democratic mechanism that could complement our voting systems. Arguably more democratic, as you need money and a support structure to have a chance to win an election.
Overfitting may be a special case of Goodhart's Law, but I don't think Goodhart's Law in general is the same as overfitting, so I don't think the conclusion is well-supported supported in general; there may be plenty of instances of proxy measures that do not have issues.
I'll also quibble with the example
of obesity: the proxy isn't nutrient-rich good, but rather the evaluation function of human taste buds (e.g. sugar detection). The problem is the abundance of food that is very nutrient-poor but stimulating to taste buds. If the food that's widely available were nutrient-rich, it's questionable whether we would have an obesity epidemic.
We realize now or at least in recent past, the value of true nutrient-rich food or a balanced diet.
Carbohydrate abundance was likely important in moving people out of hunger and poverty but excesses of the same kind of diet are a reflection on obesity.
My guess is that calorie-per-gram-per-dollar of carbohydrates is still lower than fat and protein.
Indeed, the more efficient you become the more brittle you will be. You must depend upon the present being static and the future being perfectly predictable based on the events of the past. The present and the future don't merely need to be dependable within your own domain but also in the entire world.
The flexibility necessary to succeed in a real world requires a certain level of inefficiency.
Interestingly, the same effect shows up in communications systems. The more efficient an error correction code (ie. the closer it approaches the Shannon Bound), the more catastrophically it fails when the channel capacity is reached. The "perfect" code delivers no errors up until the Shannon bound then meaningless garble (50% error rate) beyond the Shannon Bound.
My point is that error correction codes have a precise mathematical definition and have been deeply studied. Maybe there is a general principle at work in the wider world, and it is amenable to a precise proof and analysis? (My guess is that mileage may be made by applying Information Theory, as used to analyse error correcting codes.)
An interesting idea but I'd imagine you would have to operate within something like the "100 year flood" boundaries that insurance companies do in order to define a constrained domain such as the Shannon Bound. I suspect you would also have to define the scope of this principle within the company and/or deal with the compounding effects of the multiple layers of the system and its "effective inefficiency."
Yes, just-in-time supply chain systems often become over-efficient and brittle... usually because each link in the chain assumes that someone else is taking on the burden of inefficiency by having excess inventory in order to absorb shocks to the system.
The author identifies problems with a system measuring targets, but then all the proposals are about increasing the power and control of the system.
Perhaps the answer—as hippy sounding as it is—is to reduce the control of the system outright. Instead of adding more measures, more controls, which are susceptible to the prejudices of control, we let the system fall where it may.
This, to me, is a classic post of an academic understanding the failures of a system (and people like themselves in control of said system) but then not allowing the mitigation mechanisms of alternate systems to take its place.
This is one of the reasons I come to HN: to view the prime instigators of big-M Modern failure and their inability to recognize their contributions to that problem.
Loosening of control is exactly the answer, but the world pathology is currently that money/power/control are all unalloyed virtues to be pursued at any cost, so we'll have to wait for a global implosion before any of the Certified Geniuses on this site, or anywhere else, consider an alternative approach.
For an example of this, I recall reading a proposal that acts of Congress be strictly limited to be at most (say) 5 pages in length. This would be a natural form of regularization of the legislative power.
And that's leaving out Jevon's paradox, where increasing efficiency in the use of some scarce resource sometimes/often increases its consumption, by making the unit price of the dependent thing affordable and increasing its demand. For example, gasoline has limited demand if it requires ten liters to go one km, but very high demand at 1 L/10km, even at the same price per liter.
When people know the answer is always “no” they save their energy to plea for stuff they really can’t do without. You start saying yes and they’ll ask for more.
The trick is as always to find out the XY problem. What they really need may be way easier for you to implement than what they actually asked for.
Sometimes you can just embrace it, instead of looking for tricks.
If you are in the business of selling any product or service, then it's great that finding a way to make it cheaper also generates more demand for you.
I’m confused, because the “not trick” I’m talking about is the boondoggle created by giving people exactly what they ask for, making nobody happy and jamming up your throughput in the process.
To be specific: if you can find a way to make fridges for half the previous cost, and you can sell them for three quarters the previous price, you don't want to talk people out of buying more fridges. In fact, them buying vastly more fridges is exactly what you want.
I mean I'm general, I'd rather buy fewer of the same things no matter if it's cheap or expensive if I didn't have to, and it would use less resources. Juicing someone's quarterly sales report is no good reason for me to buy a refrigerator, yet here we are.
Oh, you would already have other reasons to buy a fridge. They are really useful to keep things cool, and thus keep your food and drink from spoiling.
But (in our example) the high price of a fridge has so far kept you from buying one. Luckily, prices have recently been falling, so you can finally afford one.
You look forward to a new era of less spoilage and less food waste in your life; because you'd rather use less resources. (The electricity to be burned by the new fridge comes from your rooftop photovoltaic, of course.)
---
Does this make sense? You need have no regard for anyone's quarterly sales reports.
Yeah, but it is also second-order effects where the efficient use of a resource opens it up for more uses as well as for more exploitation. Perhaps this is most visible with farmland. Efficient use of water (center-pivot sprinkler) causes much more land to be arable, causing more use of that same water as well, depleting aquifers.
There was no need to invent a new law named "strong version", it already exists: Campbell's law.
The subtle difference between the two being exactly what the author describes: Goodhart's law states that metrics eventually don't work, Campbell's law states that, worse still, eventually they tend to backfire.
I think of efficiency as one example where naive economic thinking has poisoned common sense. Economists view inefficiency as a problem. Because a healthy economy is efficient, therefore inefficiency is unhealthy. Any inefficient market is a "market failure". Efficiency is also the primary way a manager can add value. But the problem is, efficiency assumes existence of metrics, and indeed is counter productive if your metrics are wrong.
I do like it when researchers try to connect the deep ideas within their work to broader more general systems, but caution is warranted to the optimism. This article is the kind of formal analogy that inspired/drove much of the marketing appeal of the Santa Fe Institute back in the 1980s. It's honestly always pretty fun, but the devil is usual in the details here (as is usual in making anything "work", such as self-organized criticality [1] which if you enjoyed this article you will also probably enjoy!).
As just one example to make this point more concrete (LOL), the article mentions uncritically that "more complex ecosystems are more stable", but over half a century ago in 1973 Robert May wrote a book called "Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems" [2] explaining (very accessibly!) how this is untrue for the easiest ideas of "complex" and "stable". In more human terms, some ideas of "complex" & "stable" can lead you astray, as has been appearing in the relatively nice HN commentary on this article here.
Perhaps less shallowly, things go off the rails fast once you have both multiple metrics (meaning no "objective Objective") and competing & intelligent agents (meaning the system itself has a kind of intrinsic complexity, often swept under the rug by a simplistic thinking that "people are all the same"). I think this whole topic folds itself into "Humanity Complete" (after NP-complete.. a kind of infectious cluster of Wicked Problems [3]) like trust/delegation do [4].
This is super interesting. The author states "the strong version of Goodhart's law" as a fact, but does not provide a theorem which shows that it is true. This recent paper does the job.[0] The authors write about Goodhart's law in the context of AI alignment but they are clear that their theorem is much more broadly applicable:
> we provide necessary and sufficient conditions under which indefinitely optimizing for any incomplete proxy objective leads to arbitrarily low overall utility
> Our main result identifies conditions such that any misalignment is costly: starting from any initial state, optimizing any fixed incomplete proxy eventually leads the principal to be arbitrarily worse off.
> Goal: Distribution of labor and resources based upon the needs of society
> Proxy: Capitalism
> Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Massive wealth disparities (with incomes ranging from hundreds of dollars per year to hundreds of dollars per second), with more than a billion people living in poverty
Please, show me a point in all human history when we have less than 90% global population living in poverty, pre-capitalism. Yes, there are 1 billion people (out of 8 billion) living in poverty today. But they were 2 billion (of 4.5 billion total) living in poverty as recently as 1980 (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/poverty-the-past-pres...).
Poverty is steadily going down (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/poverty-the-past-pres...) since we have data. The first countries to get rid of recurrent famines were the same that first adopted capitalism. The same countries where their population started having higher expectations than to live another day.
Paraphrasing Churchill about democracy, "[capitalism] is the worst economic system except for all other systems that has been tried from time to time".
There is no such thing as capitalism. “The first countries to get rid of recurrent famine” were those that began using the steam engine and field enclosure. These are not “capitalism”, they are “capital”, in tge jargon of the economist Marx, or, in modern parlance, technology. All of the parts of the world that are not starving are not starving due to their adoption of a variety of technologies, both mechanical and bureaucratic: fertilizer, machine tractors, and centralized governance using telephone lines and now internet. When people claim “capitalism” ended starvation, they ignore places like China and Russia which also ended famine despite adopting state ownership of farms. There was indeed famine during the transition period, but Russia ended famine by the 50s and China ended famine by the 70s, long before many “capitalist” countries in the 3rd world. That’s because the world isn’t about the phony field of “economics,” it’s about technology. Likewise, the other advancements of society that are claimed to be associated with “capitalism”—the end of smallpox and other old high-casualty diseases, the development of reliable air and trans-oceanic transport, instant global communications: all are due to the efforts of scientists working in labs mostly funded by governments and wealthy patrons, not “capitalism.” Capitalist enterprises almost never take major innovative risks. Even the latest glorious advancement that will doubtless be claimed by “capitalism,” Wikipedia-scraping chat bots, was developed by a non-profit.
Everything is about technology—stop letting economists drag you into stupid, poorly formed debates using undefined terms like “capitalism.”
Technology is a large factor but not the core driver. It's individual human motivation that drives the efficiency of the system. When you centralize the function of human motivation into a governing body like socialism aims to do, the goal is that the central body can optimize the system. However, the system is too complex and always misses something that was never predicted. When you "outsource" those motive drivers back to the people with capitalism you let the system optimize itself.
Capitalism was a huge invention that for the first time in history made people invest in capital. Previously, virtually all capital was the land. When someone had extra resources, they spend them either in buying more land (thus not creating new lands, but simply land changing owner) or buying non productive things like nobility titles, weapons, big palaces... The investment in "capital" was not usual, maybe from time to time someone bought an oxen, or a new plow, but it was not the norm.
The raise of capitalism, that indeed is such thing meant the raise of systematic investment in capital. The idea of risk investing in a machine that might have a ROI was new, and the idea that the extra money earned with that investment could be used to invest even more was radically new.
Is rich to claim that "China and Russia also ended famine by 50s and 70s". Each of them had a massive and historical famines as late as 1932 and 1960, and the famine was directly caused by their economic system, proving central planning as a failure: it seem to work until the planners make some error. When that error happens sooner or later, the failure is catastrophical and generalized. In fact, China partially abandoned central planning to raise from poverty in the 70's you menction as the end of China famines, when Deng Xiaoping said that a socialist state could use the market economy without being capitalist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_market_economy). The new system means that China is politically socialist, but economically at least partially capitalist. For example, it meant that farms no longer were owned by the state. Politically they did some words juggling of "socialism", "market" and "capitalism", but in practice they just adopted capitalism as the main capital allocating force. Central planning was abandoned in the early 90s, and they adopted a western-like planning (fiscal and monetary policies, with some industrial policies).
You play dirty when comparing China and USSR with "many [unnamed] countries in the 3rd world". We are trying to discover the best way to build a society. You choose your best example, I choose mine, and lets compare. It's a low blow that you can choose your best example and pit it to my worst (and probably not even representative). It highlights that you are not after the truth. You just hate capitalism and need to manipulate reality to "win" internet arguments.
You are making some strawman argument here. You claim that capitalism doesn't innovate or take risks, something that nobody claims! Here goes an example: oil cracking was invented in Imperial Russia in 1891. But due to lack of capitalist institutions, it has no use for gasoline: it was a refinery dangerous waste. For 20 years they had an invention in a box that served no one. In 1913, the process was re-invented in the US and was immediately put to work towards humanity advance: gasoline was needed for cars. One invention calls for the other, all of them guided by profit seeking.
Capitalism doesn't claim to be the source of advances, inventions or discoveries. It claims to be the best known way to put those advances, regardless who made them, in use. It claims to be the best capital allocator in existence.
“Though this pheonomenon is often discussed, it doesn't seem to be named. Let's call it the strong version of Goodhart's law“
I wonder why the author called it that way when this seems to me clearly derived from Ross Ashby‘s law of Requisite Variet[1], predating Goodhard by 20 years. As I see it, it is not even necessary to put more meaning it Goodhard as there actually is. Requisite Variety is sufficient. Going by his resume, I strongly assume the author knows this.
Russel Ackoff, building on countless others, put into two sentences for which others needed two volumes:
“The behaviour of a system is never equal to the behaviour of its parts. - It is the product of their interactions.“
Love myself some cybernetics! All engineers are doing themselves a disservice by sitting here writing smooth-brained rants about “dumb MBAs making my job hard” instead of reading up on this field and understanding the true complexities that are inherent in people working together.
Agreed. I wonder if this is still the aftermath of the chasm which resulted when ‘Marvin Minsky et al‚ disowned Cybernetics, took some parts out of it and gave it a shiny new name.
Especially Systems Theory in its second manifestation (Maturana, Luhmann, von Förster, Glasersfeld - and Ackoff) is extremely powerful, deep and, reasons beyond me, totally overlooked.
Have to say tho, most MBA‘s I encountered sadly never ever heard of Cybernetics or Systems Theory. :-(
I made a mistake here, leading astray. It's second-order cybernetics, not second order systems theory. I melted the two in my head, reason is that (Social) Systems Theory according to Niklas Luhmann [1] incorporates several parts of second order cybernetics (most of the people mentioned before show up there) and blends it all together to a point where I have difficulties to distinguish the separate parts.
This is all not 'new' in the literal sense. Luhmann died in the late 90s. I tried to come up with a spot-on-book of Luhmann, but that lead to nothing. It's all spread out (papers and books) as far as I know. There is a (transcribed) lecture given in 1992, which may come close, but I couldn't find a translated version of it.
One of the parts which hit home for me was the introduction of a differenciated form of distinctiveness, in turn partly enabled by the introduction of an observer, and observation in general. Heinz von Foerster gave an often cited sentence which I think fits the part, albeit Luhmann gurus will probably moan my simplification : "Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer."
Apart from that, sorry for not being more helpful here.
When we optimize we typically have a specific scenario in our head. With the proper tools one can probably make the mathematically optimal decisions to deal with this exact scenario.
However: 1) This exact scenario will likely never materialize 2) You have not good quantification of the scenario anyway due to noise/biases in measurements.
So now you optimized for something very specific, and the nature throws you something slightly different and you are completely screwed because your optimized solve is not flexible at all.
That is why a more “suboptimal” approach is typically better and why our stupid brains outperform super fancy computers and algorithms in planning.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this but this doesn't seem like an accurate explanation of overfitting:
> In machine learning (ML), overfitting is a pervasive phenomenon. We want to train an ML model to achieve some goal. We can't directly fit the model to the goal, so we instead train the model using some proxy which is similar to the goal
One of the pernicious aspects of overfitting is it occurs even if you can perfectly represent your goal via a training metric. In fact it's even worse simetimes as an incorrect training metric can indirectly help regularise the outcome.
You might be misunderstanding here what the "goal" is. Your training metric is just another approximation of the goal, and it is almost never perfect. If it is perfect, you cannot overfit, by definition.
I was thinking how this string of thought could connect to our daily lives. As a family with a toddler, if we fill up too much of our schedule/time in a day, a perturbation to the schedule can break everything. If instead we fill up 63-70% of the schedule and build in Flex Time, we're good!
The argument is that regardless of what metic is chosen, it'll create deminishing returns followed by negative returns.
What it means is the objective can't be static - for example once satiated, you need to pick different one to keep improving globally. Or do something else that moves the goalpost.
> [..] it signifies the level of performance that uses the least amount of inputs to achieve the highest amount of output. It often specifically comprises the capability of a specific application of effort to produce a specific outcome with a minimum amount or quantity of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort.
to quote wikipedia quoting Sickles, R., and Zelenyuk, V. (2019). "Measurement of Productivity and Efficiency: Theory and Practice". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Offering that criticism without clarifying what efficiency measures in your opinion doesn't allow us to follow your viewpoint without us just taking your word for it. Needless to say this isn't considered good style in a discourse.
A 100 percent "efficient" system can be one that is overfitted to certain metrics and it is the typical death sin of management to confuse metrics with reality and miss that their great numbers hollow out anything that makes a system work well and reliable, because guess what: having 1 critical employee and working them like a mule is good when things work, but bad when they suddenly don't, because that second employee you thought was fat that could be cut, was your fallback. In that case your metric of efficiency was slightly increased while another, less easy to quantify (and therefore often non-existent) metric of resilience went down significantly. This means if your goal was having an efficient and resilient company, but your metric only measured the former, guess what.
Same is true in engineering, where you can optimize your system so much to fit your expected problem, one slight deviation within the problem now stops the whole thing from working alltogether (F1 racing car when part of the track turns out to be a sucky dirtroad). Highly optimized systems are highly optimized towards one particular situation and thus less flexible.
Or in biology, where everybody ought to know that mixed woods are more resilient to storms and other pests, while having great side effects for the health of the ecosystem, yet in pure economic terms it is easy to convince yourself the added effíciency of a monoculture is worth it economically, because all you look at is revenue, while ignoring multiple other metrics that impact reality.
Yeah, every single example listed looks like gaming of bad metrics. Framing it as overfitting is unproductive, IMHO, and discounts the essentially adversarial context. I also discounts the stupidity of equating "efficiency" with a high score on a simple metric. Reality has a Surprising Amount of Detail, and all that.
This hits home. Management has started measuring things at my workplace. They won't admit it, but I said from the start it was because they are easy to measure, not because they are useful.
I am surprised that the author left out another mitigation. To build solutions (models) that are constructed to be more transferable (amenable to out of domain data). For example, in machine learning, using physics informed models. Perhaps this is simply a sign that the author is a proponent of generic, deep-learning.
Upon reading the title at first glance, I thought this was going to be how "effecient" computers nowadays. Such as MacBooks and such, who started this efficient computers thing in the recent times. And they are, but as a result computers are all worse off for it. I mean soldered RAMs and everything is a system on a chip.
That wouldn’t be worthy of the front page of HN. “I don’t like the current tradeoffs that laptop manufacturers make” has been talked through to absolute death. It’s the opposite of interesting.
I find this article a bit odd, considering what the author is an expert in: generative imagery. It's the exact problem he discusses, the lack of a target that is measurable. Defining art is well known to be ineffable, yet it is often agreed upon. For thousands of years we've been trying to define what good art means.
But you do not get good art by early stopping, you do not get it by injecting noise, you do not get it by regularization. All these do help and are essential to our modeling processes, but we are still quite far. We have better proxies than FID but they all have major problems and none even come close (even when combined).
We've gotten very good at AI art but we've still got a long way to go. Everyone can take a photo, but not everyone is a photographer and it takes great skill and expertise to take such masterpieces. Yet there are masters of the craft. Sure, AI might be better than you at art but that doesn't mean it's close to a master. As unintuitive as this sounds. This is because skill isn't linear. The details start to dominate as you become an expert. A few things might be necessary to be good, but a million things need be considered in mastery. Because mastery is the art of subtly. But this article, it sounds like everything is a nail. We don't have the methods yet and my fear is that we don't want to look (there are of course many pursuing this course, but it is very unpopular and not well received. Scale is all you need is quite exciting, but lacking sufficient complexity, which even Sutton admits to be necessary). It's my fear that we get too caught up in excitement that we become blind to our limitations. Because it's knowing those limitations that is what gives us direction to improve upon. When every critique is seen as spoiling the fun of the party, we'll never be able to have anything better. I'm not trying to stop the party, in fact, I'm worried it'll stop.
> But this article, it sounds like everything is a nail
In the process, acting somewhat like a generalization of the problem it describes: overly precise and narrow approaches to "improve" ineffable qualities. But the author seems to understand that - he comments on the absurdity of some direct transfers of ML methods to real world problems. I think he just added a bunch of not necessarily well solvable, but particularly suffering from "overfitting", example problems. It's a food for thought article, not a grand proposal.
I think you're probably right tbh. But I do think this point could be stressed a bit more. Especially when we're talking about how easy it is to trick ourselves into thinking we're doing what's good enough.
You can also be too efficient in your career/life. You can take the "Inject noise into the system" as injecting positive randomness into your associations with people and ideas. If something seems slightly interesting but off your beaten track, learn more about it.
I have a pet theory that the state-planned economies failed not because they were inefficient (as neoclassical economics claims), but rather because they attempted to be too efficient. They tried to exactly calculate which producer needs what inputs, what they should produce and when, and a little deviation from the plan caused big cascading failures.
Free market is actually less efficient than direct control, but it is correspondingly more robust. This is evidenced in the big companies, which also sometimes try to control things in the name of "efficiency" and end up being quite inefficient. And also small companies, which are often competing and duplicating efforts.
The optimum (I hesitate it call that because it's not well-defined, it is in some sense a society's choice) seems to be somewhere in the middle - you need decent amount of central direction (almost all private companies have that) and redundancy (provided by investment funds on the free market).
(As aside, despite me being democratic socialist, I don't believe the democracy matters that much for economic development, but is desirable from a moral perspective. You can have a lot of economic development under authoritarian rule, there are examples on both sides, as most private companies are also actually small authoritarian fiefdoms.)
On this side track to the discussion, I think that a major factor there was the location of decision making vs. where the action took place. Too much control was taken away from the location where it was needed.
Centralization does that, in general, not just in those countries.
There is a reason octopuses have sub-brains in their arms, and that some of our reflexes are controlled from neurons in the spine and not from all the way up in the brain, and why small army units have some autonomy.
Isn't centralized vs decentralized just another case of efficient vs robust?
If you want to make an optimal decision, you need to make it in a centralized fashion, in some form. But that also gives you a single point of failure.
That suggests a plausible mechanism for why the dissolution of the Union was so peaceful: faced with a call for glasnost' from Moscow, local leaders preferred to quietly leave?
Do we have any reasonable datasets for before-and-after corruption levels in the FSU, or would that be a project which would* need another 3-5 decades to be viable?
* in the absence of sufficient well-placed cabbage?
Also, can't recall it but a long time ago I read a piece about how scheduling a system to 60% of its max capacity is generally about right, to allow for expected but unexpected variations (also makes me think of the concept of stochastic process control and how we can figure out the level of expected unexpected variations, which could give us an even better sense of what %-of-capacity to run a system at)
This is more a meta comment about the blog itself (as is customary for HN): I like the blog, there has been a lot of work put into it, so it makes me sad that it's hosted on GitHub pages using a subdomain of GitHub.io. When the day comes that GitHub inevitably kills/ruins Pages, because it _will_ happen, there is no question, the links to this blog will be stuck forever pointing to this dead subdomain that the author has no control over. We just have to hope that the replacement blog is findable via search engines, and hope that comments are enabled wherever the pages link is referenced so that new people can find the blog. An unfortunate mess that is definitely going to happen, entirely Microsoft's fault.
Assuming he's not 70, I guarantee GitHub pages will turn to shit before he dies.
But also fair point. I think we should all have a contingency plan I'm case of death, regardless of where our stuff is hosted. Self-hosted stuff indeed becomes a ticking time bomb after death. Even on 3rd party services, it's apparently a nightmare trying to get access to a deceased person's Google account, where Google Sites may live, etc.
Efficiency tends to come at the cost of adaptability. Don't put it on rails if it needs a steering wheel. So many enterprises suffer from extreme rigidity - often caused by optimizations that lead to local maxima.
Metrics are ambiguous because they are abstractions of success and miss context. If you want a pretty little number, it doesn’t come without cost/missing information.
I don’t know if this phenomenon is aptly characterized as “too much efficiency”.
> FTA: This same counterintuitive relationship between efficiency and outcome occurs in machine learning.
The "examples abound, in politics, economics, health, science, and many other fields" isn't a relationship between efficiency and outcome, but rather measuring and efficiency, or measuring and outcome. I think a better analogy is Heissenberg's uncertainty principle – the more you measure the more you (negatively) affect the environment you're measuring.
This certainly tugs at all the right levers of the intuition. Not sure how to "buck the trend" in any established organization/regime to adjust expectations according to the theory. Looks like this might need to be demonstrated in the wild at a new concern or as a turnaround job, where the leaders could have a strong influence on the culture (similar to how Jim Keller steered AMD and is now steering TensTorrent).
In practice this is just Goodhart's law itself. It's not distinct. In Goodhart's law
> when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
If you ask someone "could you give me an example" you will see that in the example the measure that becomes a target is already a proxy. Even the example that the author presents, the good that cares a lot about testing its students... How does the school test its students? With exams. But that's already a proxy for testing students knowledge...
Really interesting to learn about the ML perspective of the cost of localized efficiency. Local efficiency can also make things worse from a queueing theory perspective. Optimizing a process step that feeds a system bottleneck can cause queues to pile up, decreasing system-level productivity. Automating production of waste forces downstream processes to deal with added waste.
Efficiency means minimizing the use of the costliest components. It's installing fault points into a system on purpose.
Robust systems minimize fault points. Efficient systems come at the cost of robustness, and vice versa given a fixed definition of what is being conserved, i.e. costs or energy.
For example, a four cylinder engine that gets 15mpg will have a longer life than one that gets 30mpg, given the same cost.
Kinda surprised to not see anyone mention Jacques Ellul and his The Technological Society which highly revolve around this. Technological here does not refer to technology.
There is a big difference between efficiency and effectiveness, and all system should focus on the latter rather than the former whether it's AI based or not.
There's a reason why the best-seller of self-help book for several decades now is the book by Stephen Covey entitled "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" not "Efficient People".
While this intuitively seems likes good idea, his real life examples are severely lacking. This gets interesting when we see where the rubber hits the road, the causes and effects of what is being optimized for vs what is happening and we look deeply into improving that scenario.
Really interesting article. Got me pondering the extent to which the peacock’s tail is an example of overfitting and Goodhart's
The female peacock is using the make peacock’s tail as a proxy for fitness - with beautiful consequences, but the males with the largest, showiest tails are clearly less fit, and more prone to predation.
That's the point. That they are alive shows that their innate fitness minus the tail is higher than that of another alive peacock who doesn't have a tail.
Or put another way: someone who wins the Olympic 100m sprint while hopping on one leg is a better runner that everyone else in the race by a wide margin.
Really interesting article. Got me pondering the extent to which the peacock’s tail is an example of overfitting and Goodhart's
The female peacock is using the make peacock’s tail as a proxy for fitness - with beautiful consequences, but the males with the largest, showiest tails are clearly less fit
In short, efficiency is fragile. If you want your thing to be be stronger after a shock (instead of falling apart), you must design it to be antifragile.
Note: it's hard to build antifragile physical things or software, but processes and organizations are easier. ML models can be antifragile if they're constantly updating.
Kind of reminds of the cellular automaton, about how reducing the number of components can lead to complex worlds and rules. Maybe tangentially related. Conway game of life is another example.
Teaching is a terrible example. Teaching is actually more efficient when it is decentralised as the teachers can adapt to local environment and changes. With centralisation you have bad feedback loop.
Can't agree with you more my friend. Another point on a philosophical level is efficiency or optimization in life, which always focuses on tangible aspects and ignores the greater intangible aspects of life.
Important subject, so-so blog post. This idea deserves further development.
The author seems to be discussing optimizing for the wrong metric. That's not a problem of too much efficiency.
Excessive efficiency problems are different. They come from optimizing real output at the expense of robustness. Just-in-time systems have that flaw. Price/performance is great until there's some disruption, then it's terrible for a while.
Overfitting is another real problem, but again, a different one. Overfitting is when you try to model something with too complex a model and and up just encoding the original data in the model, which then has no predictive power.
Optimizing for the wrong metric, and what do about it, is an important issue. This note calls out that problem but then goes off in another direction.
Very good characterisation of close, but distinct concepts. (a map of a domain)
If we squint a little, focus on close/far-away instead of same/distinct and s/metric/model/g (because usage of a metric implies a model), we can see how close these things can be.
Optimizing for the wrong metric - becomes “using a wrong model”.
Excessive efficiency - is partially “using a wrong model”, or maybe “good model != perfect model”. We start with good enough model, but after certain threshold we get to experience the difference between “good enough” and “perfect” (aparantly we care about redundancy, but it was not part of our model; so we were using a wrong model)
Overfitting is “finding the wrong model” (I wanted a model for the whole population, got a model only for a sample)
..or if we squint even more and go meta..
overfitting is part of “good model != perfect (meta)model” of modeling.
(using sample data is good enough, but not perfect)
P.S. I liked the article. Choice of the title - not so much.
P.P.S. Simplicity of a model is part of meta-model.
The author is a very sharp individual but is there a reason he insists on labelling overfitting as a phenomenon from machine learning instead of from classical statistics?
It might simply be that he didn't trace the etymology back that far.
If it turned out that the term actually started in tailoring before statistics really got it's feet under it (which I absolutely cannot say that it did, just that trying to extrapolate backwards that sounds like a reasonable guess) then it wouldn't speak poorly of you if you hadn't also known that.
The author is an academic, it is important to give proper credit for ideas within reason. Same reason I call F = ma the law of Newton and now the law of my high school physics teacher, even though I learned it first from him.
The reason I have this quibble is because the author says things like
>you should consider building formal (mathematical) bridges between results on overfitting in machine learning, and problems in economics, political science, management science, operations research, and elsewhere
If we are appropriately modest and acknowledge the fact that overfitting is well-studied by statisticians (although, obviously not in the context of deep neural networks), it seems kind of ridiculous to make statements like, economists and political scientists should consider using statistics?
They don't say "classical statistics," but I don't see any implication that the phenomenon was born from machine learning, even if they say it's a common problem within machine learning. Maybe I missed it? They do mention modelling their conception of overfitting around Goodhart's Law, noting its origin in economics.
If a citizen recognizes or intuits this to be a deep-seated problem of the political process, and if the only concrete influence this citizen can exert on the political process is choosing one of several proposed representatives, it seems rational to choose the most irrational, volatile, chaotic and unpredictable candidate.
The ideal choice would be a random number generator, but lacking that, he would want to inject the greatest dose of entropy available into the system.
From a social / emotional / spiritual/ humanistic perspective, this is what I see in the "productivity" and "wellness" spaces.
"Ahh, if only I hyperoptimize all aspects of my existence, then I will achieve inner peace. I just need to be more efficient with my time and goals. Just one more meditation. One more gratitude exercise. If only I could be consistent with my habits, then I would be happy."
I've come to see these things as a hindrance to true emotional processing, which is what I think many of us actually need. Or at least it's what I need - maybe I'm just projecting onto everyone else.
Some of us are trying to optimize for things other than happiness. An occasional bit of happiness can be a nice side effect of certain types of optimization but happiness isn't a reasonable goal to focus on by itself.
Happiness is a valid goal. If one perceives it’s not reasonable to expect it, then you may arrive at this conclusion. But imo that’s because we short-circuit happiness to sources of pleasure that we see aren’t that reliable.
Hell, even this settling for happiness as a side-product is a result of the judgement that this is the best we can do regarding the goal of happiness.
I am skeptical of the analogy to overfitting, although I understand where the author is coming from and agree with the sentiment.
The basic problem is stupid simple. Optimizing a process for one specific output necessarily un-optimizes for everything else.
Right now much of commerce and labor in the United States is over-optimized for humans because tech businesses are optimizing for specific outcomes (productivity, revenue, etc) in a way that ignores the negative impacts on the humans involved.
The optimizations always turn into human goals, eg my manager needs to optimize for productivity if they want a bonus (or not get optimized out themselves), which means they need to measure or estimate or judge or guess each of their employees’ productivity, and stupid MBA shit like Jack Welch’s “fire the lowest 10% every year”) results in horrible human outcomes.
Sure there are people who need to be fired, but making it an optimization exercise enshittified it.
Same for customer service. Amazon wants to optimize revenue. Customer service and returns are expensive. Return too many things? You’re fired as a customer.
Call your mobile providers customer service too often? Fired.
Plus let’s not staff customer service with people empowered to do, well, service. Let’s let IVRs and hold times keep the volumes low.
All anecdotes but you’ve experienced something similar often enough to know it is the rule, not the exception, and it’s all due to over-optimization.
I like the connection between Goodheart's law and overfitting. However these examples are a reach:
--- Goal: Healthy population Proxy: Access to nutrient-rich food Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Obesity epidemic
I'm not sure I believe this one. Exactly who's target is "access to nutrient-rich food" and how would removing that target fix the US obesity epidemic? Is "nutrient-rich" a euphemism for high-calorie? My understanding is that there are plenty of places with high-nutrient food but different norms and much better health (e.g. Japan).
We can and do measure population health across (including obesity), this isn't a proxy for an unmeasurable thing.
--- Goal: Leaders that act in the best interests of the population Proxy: Leaders that have the most support in the population Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Leaders whose expertise and passions center narrowly around manipulating public opinion at the expense of social outcomes
Is this really a case of "overfitting from too much data"? Or is this just a case of "some things are hard to predict?" Or even, "it's hard to give politicians incentives." It'd be interesting if we gave presidents huge prizes if the country was better 20 years after they left office.
--- Goal: An informed, thoughtful, and involved populace Proxy: The ease with which people can share and find ideas Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Filter bubbles, conspiracy theories, parasitic memes, escalated tribalism
Is "the goal" really a thoughtful populace? Because every individual's goal is pleasure, and the companies goals are selling ads. So I don't know who's working on that goal.
Too much efficiency countering too much efficiency makes everything worse.
This whole thesis easily tips over into a semantic gobbledygook, as efficiency is not a property of the larger world, but an utter contrivance of thought.
Focus on anything to the exclusion of everything use and things are going wrong. How has the obviousness of this observation has turned into a breakthrough? AI is the perfect nexus for such a discovery: trying to optimize a system when you don't understand how it works naturally has pitfalls.
So what can it mean to try to mathematically formalize a misunderstanding? Maybe there's a true breakthrough lurking near this topic: that all understanding is incomplete, so look for guiding principles of approximation?
The author is right to call out the forest for the trees.
The author is right that we rely on metrics too much. But he's biased against capitalism and his proposed cure is more socialism. What's actually lacking is wisdom and integrity.
IMO the theory at the start of the post is well written and almost there, but it needs to more substantively engage with the relevant philosophical concepts. As a result, the title "efficiency is bad!" is incorrect in my opinion.
That said, the post is still valuable and would work much better with a framing closer to "some analogies between statistical analysis and public policy" -- the rest of the post (all the political recommendations) is honestly really solid, even if I don't see a lot of the particular examples' connections to their analogous ML approaches. The creativity is impressive, and overall I think it's a productive, thought-provoking exercise. Thanks for posting OP!
Now, for any fellow pendants, the philosophical critique:
more efficient centralized tracking of student progress by standardized testing
The bad part of standardized testing isn't at all that it's "too efficient", it's that it doesn't measure all the educational outcomes we desire. That's just regular ol' flawed metrics.
This same counterintuitive relationship between efficiency and outcome occurs in machine learning, where it is called overfitting.
Again, overfitting isn't an example of a model being too efficacious, much less too efficient (which IMO is, in technical contexts, a measure of speed/resource consumption and not related to accuracy in the first place).
Overfitting on your dataset just means that you built a (virtual/non-actual) model that doesn't express the underlying (virtual) pattern you're concerned with, but rather a subset of that pattern. That's not even a problem necessarily, if you know what subset you've expressed -- words like "under"/"too close" come into play when it's a random or otherwise meaningless subset.
I'm not allowed to train my model on the test dataset though (that would be cheating), so I instead train the model on a proxy dataset, called the training dataset.
I'd say that both the training and test sets are actualized expressions of your targeted virtual pattern. 100% training accuracy means little if it breaks in online, real-world use.
When a measure becomes a target, if it is effectively optimized, then the thing it is designed to measure will grow worse.
I'd take this as proof that what we're really talking about here is efficacy, not efficiency. This is cute and much better than the opening/title, but my critique above tells me that this is just a wordy rephrasing of "different things have differences". That certainly backs up their claim that the proposed law is universal, at least!
It would be nice, if us on HN, can crowdsource, some good KPIs/Proxies for the goals mentioned in the article.
These ones:
Goal: Educate children well
Proxy: Measure student and school performance on standardized tests
Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Schools narrowly focus on teaching students to answer questions like those on the test, at the expense of the underlying skills the test is intended to measure
---
Goal: Rapid progress in science
Proxy: Pay researchers a cash bonus for every publication
Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Publication of incorrect or incremental results, collusion between reviewers and authors, research paper mills
---
Goal: A well-lived life
Proxy: Maximize the reward pathway in the brain
Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Substance addiction, gambling addiction, days lost to doomscrolling Twitter
---
Goal: Healthy population
Proxy: Access to nutrient-rich food
Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Obesity epidemic
---
Goal: Leaders that act in the best interests of the population
Proxy: Leaders that have the most support in the population
Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Leaders whose expertise and passions center narrowly around manipulating public opinion at the expense of social outcomes
---
Goal: An informed, thoughtful, and involved populace
Proxy: The ease with which people can share and find ideas
Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Filter bubbles, conspiracy theories, parasitic memes, escalated tribalism
---
Goal: Distribution of labor and resources based upon the needs of society
Proxy: Capitalism
Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Massive wealth disparities (with incomes ranging from hundreds of dollars per year to hundreds of dollars per second), with more than a billion people living in poverty
---
I will start:
Goal: Leaders that act in the best interests of the population
Good proxy: Mandate that local leaders can only send their kids to the schools in their precinct. They can only take their families to the hospitals in their precincts.
"Efficiency" meaning, given some input cost, reducing the loss of applying that cost, toward some measured outcomes. High efficiency implies something about each of those three stages, none of which are reasonable to apply in all situations:
1. That the only input to the system is cost/money (or proxies of that, like compensated human time). Put another way: That the model you're working with is perfectly liquid, and you don't need to worry about fundamental supply constraints.
2. That the loss is truly loss, and there isn't some knock-on effects from that loss which might range from generally beneficial and good, to actually being somewhat responsible for the output metric, and your model is measuring the wrong thing.
3. That the output metric correctly and holistically proxies for the real-world outcomes you desire.
Using the example from the article on standardized testing: A school administration might make an efficiency argument by comparing dollars spent to standardized test scores.
* Dollars isn't the only input to this system, however; two major ones also include the quality of teachers and home life of the students. Increasing the spend of the system might do nothing to standardized test scores if these two qualities also can't be improved (you might make the argument that increasing dollars attracts better teachers, and there's some truth to this, but generally (even in tech) these two things just aren't strongly correlated; many organizations have forgotten what it even means to be "good at your job" and how to screen for quality in interviews. When organizations lose that, no amount of money can generate good hires because the litmus test doing the hiring is bad).
* "Loss" in this system might be the increase of funding without seeing proportionally increasing test scores; which does not account for spending money in extracurriculars like music, art, and sports; all generally desirable things we believe money should be spent on (isn't it interesting that we call these things "extra"curriculars?).
* Even if a school administration can apply this model to increase test scores, increasing test scores might not be an outcome anyone really wants. As the article says, all that guarantees is a generation of great test-takers. Increasing college acceptance rates? We've guaranteed a generation of debtors and bad degrees. Turns out, its impossible to proxy for the real world thing you want, in a way that can be measured on a societal level.
All of this is really just symptoms of the "financialization of everything", which has been talked about endlessly. In particular to this discussion, society has broadly forgotten about what the word "service" means; that public transit in your city must be a capitalistic enterprise, it itself has an efficiency metric that must be internally positive, because the broader positive efficiency impact that public transit network has on the people and businesses in the city, and thus municipal tax income, is too complex to account for within a more unified economic model.
I recognize the author Jascha as an incredibly brilliant ML researcher, formerly at Google Brain and now at Anthropic.
Among his notable accomplishments, he and coauthors mathematically characterized the propagation of signals through deep neural networks via techniques from physics and statistics (mean field and free probability theory). Leading to arguably some of the most profound yet under-appreciated theoretical and experimental results in ML in the past decade. For example see “dynamical isometry” [1] and the evolution of those ideas which were instrumental in achieving convergence in very deep transformer models [2].
After reading this post and the examples given, in my eyes there is no question that this guy has an extraordinary intuition for optimization, spanning beyond the boundaries of ML and across the fabric of modern society.
We ought to recognize his technical background and raise this discussion above quibbles about semantics and definitions.
Let’s address the heart of his message, the very human and empathetic call to action that stands in the shadow of rapid technological progress:
> If you are a scientist looking for research ideas which are pro-social, and have the potential to create a whole new field, you should consider building formal (mathematical) bridges between results on overfitting in machine learning, and problems in economics, political science, management science, operations research, and elsewhere.
[1] Dynamical Isometry and a Mean Field Theory of CNNs: How to Train 10,000-Layer Vanilla Convolutional Neural Networks
http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/xiao18a/xiao18a.pdf
[2] ReZero is All You Need: Fast Convergence at Large Depth
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.04887
Interesting timing for me! Just a couple of days ago I discovered the work of biologist Olivier Hamant who has been raising exactly this issue. His main thesis is that very high performance (which he defines as efficacy towards a known goal plus efficiency) and very high robustness (the ability to withstand large fluctuations in the system) are physically incompatible. Examples abound in nature. Contrary to common perception evolution does not optimise for high performance but high robustness. Giving priority to performance may have made sense in a world of abundant resources, but we are now facing a very different period where instability is the norm. We must (and will be forced to) backtrack on performance in order to become robust. It’s the freshest and most interesting take on the poly-crisis that I’ve seen in a long time.
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Tracts_N_50_Antidote_...
I don’t think it’s smart to proactively back track without being very careful. One thing that’s needed is for corporate death to be allowed to occur. Right now the downsides of risky behavior is bailed out for large enough risk. Then the companies that fail aren’t robust and the ones that don’t are but bailouts let non robust companies keep going. Otherwise “robustness” is a property without a measure which means that you’ll get robustness theater where actions are being taken in the name of being robust but it’s not actually making a difference at best and could be making things worse.
As for society itself being robust, it’s a much harder property. Being robust is nice but no one actually wants to live in a metered society where there’s insufficient resources - they’d generally rather kill for resources greedily and let others fail without helping them. That’s why socialized healthcare struggles - while it guarantees a minimum of care for everybody, the care provided has longer wait times and most people are not willing to wait their turn.
In a free market economy we shouldn't demand robustness, we should create a system that promotes and rewards robustness. A strict commitment against bail-outs would certainly be part of that. Companies (and private people) can decide to lower their risk exposure (at the cost of efficiency/profit) or take out insurance against risks. And if they go the insurance route they have to assess how likely their insurance is to go insolvent at the next insurance event. That's how you reward those that are actually resilient.
Healthcare is more complicated. It can never work as an efficient free market since nobody goes comparison shopping for the hospital with the best value-for-money when they have a car crash. That's why socialized healthcare achieves much better results per dollar spent. But it's often hamstrung by attempts at efficiency.
I think a better societal example is disaster relief: helping people back up after they have been hit by a hurricane is the humane thing to do, but how much is that encouraging people to settle in high risk areas with insufficient precautions?
Patients have time to shop for most healthcare services. Only a small fraction of healthcare spending is for emergencies. The highest cost stuff is mostly elective procedures. If you need a colonoscopy or hip replacement then you have time to shop around.
Socialized healthcare has its advantages and is probably more cost effective on average. But we also see affluent Canadians coming to the USA as medical tourists and paying cash for MRI scans in order to avoid the queues back home.
> Patients have time to shop for most healthcare services.
Patients have the time but rarely have the actual ability to shop around outside asking "is this provider in my coverage plan?" They demand me to sign a document stating I'm willing and able to pay while often never being able to actually tell me what the procedure will actually cost. Often, they won't even know that same day the procedure is done, it'll be weeks before I'm actually invoiced. And don't even get me started when you've chosen the surgeon in your plan, the facility in your plan but it turns out the anesthesiologist they scheduled wasn't in your plan. Oops. That's an expensive mistake you made, should have shopped around!
My knee kept locking up and I'd experience tremendous pain. Only once every few weeks though, so I had time to "shop around". I called up several places and tried to get an estimate of what it would cost ahead of actually seeing the doctor. Nobody would actually offer that, they could only make an appointment to see the doctor. No idea what the doctor would actually want to do during that appointment, so who knows what things will cost. Will they want x-rays? Will they want an MRI? Can they do the MRI there? Won't know until you commit to paying!
And out of the few dozen choices of kinesiologists around me which were covered by my insurance few had any appointments available within the next several weeks. Many weren't seeing new patients. So really it was deal with my knee randomly causing me immense pain for several more months or take whoever had the first appointment. And this is in one of the top five largest metro areas in the country, not some small town in the middle of nowhere.
Shopping for which hospital to do the delivery of my children, the estimates for our costs after insurance had a massive amount of uncertainty to the point of being useless. Could be $4k, could be $20k, who knows. Imagine going to a burger joint and the menu says a burger could be anywhere from $1 to $50, we'll invoice you in a month. Go down the street, menu says it could be $3 to $48, we'll invoice you in a few weeks. What an ability to shop around! Free market at work!
> avoid the queues back home.
I already mentioned, most kinesiologists around me were fully booked for months. Very few had anything within several weeks. That's queueing.
I tried to book an appointment with a new dermatologist a few months ago. Once again, in this very large metro area. For dermatologists in my area covered by my insurance, the earliest appointment was six months out. It took several months to get a family member's hip replacement scheduled. We have queues in this country as well.
Getting medical imaging is generally pretty quick and easy though, and places like MRI imaging centers just want to keep moving people through so if they have an empty spot in an afternoon having someone in the machine constantly is important. It's also generally the easiest thing to automate in healthcare; mostly just a matter of getting enough machines and lightly trained techs to rotate people through. Radiologists are often off-site contractors getting paid for every scan they review.
It's unreasonable for you to expect a cost estimate on knee pain. You can ask the provider organization how much they charge for a regular office visit, and then check your coinsurance or copay amount. During the initial office visit the doctor is likely to recommend follow-up tests, imaging scans, medications, and/or physical therapy; you can then ask for price estimates on those additional services.
The No Surprises Act does give patients some protection against high charges for out-of-network services.
https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/no-surprises-unders...
> It's unreasonable for you to expect a cost estimate on knee pain
Ok, but then it goes back to this idea of queueing and the "free market". Ok, so it'll take me a few weeks to go to the first doctor just to get his paid estimate. If I don't like whatever estimate he gives (which once again he probably won't directly) what am I to do? Start calling around, make another appointment with someone else several weeks later and pay yet another appointment fee? Hope his prices are better? Rinse and repeat to get a few quotes?
And so continuing the burger example, you call ahead to book a time well in advance and pay $2 just to be able to look at the menu. What a free market.
One of my kids had to get tubes in his ears. I didn't actually get a good faith estimate of cost until that morning in the hospital despite calling several times. I had to schedule, wait weeks, show up early in the morning, and refuse to sign for the financial liability until I got an actual estimate. Free markets at work here guys, totally not a broken system, easily just shop around. And yeah, sure, I could have gone to see a different audiologist and then gone through scheduling it all again and waiting another few months and a couple hundred dollars. After all its just my kid's speech development, no big deal delaying that another month or two (or three).
At least it's good to see this No Surprises Bill solved at least that one example of the healthcare industry screwing people over. Thanks for sharing that.
>private people) can decide to lower their risk exposure
I think the complexities of modern societies make it too difficult to measure this risk adequately. We just don’t have the bandwidth to think about the second-and-third order effects for every social/financial interaction we encounter. And people are generally very poor at estimating high-consequence/low-probability events. This means people will often take very outsized risks without realizing it; when bad things happen it creates an unstable society. I don’t think we’ve evolved to personally manage all the c risks in a large complex society and farming those risks out to institutions seems to be the current way most societies have decided to mitigate those risks.
It also doesn't strike me as very fair. If you smoke, should you not receive cancer care because you took unnecessary risk?
I can see how you could arrive at similar conclusions from a risk management perspective, but it's not a morally just system. Within the system risk taking must be accepted.
Depending on your definition of “fair” this presupposes people are good at estimating risk. The above premise was is based on the fact that they are not. I think there’s a lot of behavioral research that backs that up.
>...farming those risks out to institutions seems to be the current way most societies have decided to mitigate those risks
Unfortunately, those institutions --be they governments, insurance companies, UL Labs, banks, venture capitalists, etc.--also need to be vetted.
Even when staffed with impeccably well credentialed and otherwise highly capable people, their conclusions may be drawn using a different risk framework than your own.
The risk that they mitigate may even be the risk that you won't vote for them, give them money, etc.
There is also the risk of having too little risk, a catastrophe no worse than too much risk. The balloon may not pop, but it may never be filled.
I don’t think anyone reasonable is advocating believing institutions on blind faith (possibly with the exception of religious institutions). They need to be transparent and also strive to reflect the values (risk and otherwise) of their constituents.
That solution is never going to work when black swan events occur on the order of every 5-10 years and executive vision is focused on the next quarter with little concern paid to anything outside the next 2-3 years. Nobody is going to want to give up short term performance to mitigate risks that probably won't manifest until after they've left for a better job.
That solution is how it already works for the vast majority of companies in the US.
“Too big to fail” is a meme that only applied to a tiny handful of companies during the financial crisis. Take a look at SVB for how fast a stalwart huge bank can implode with zero fucks given by the government.
By "zero fucks given by the government" do you mean the government got involved, effectively bought the bank, and took responsibility for 100% of deposits (most of which were the balances of startups, ie venture capital investments)?
Nope, shareholders got wiped out and the bank was done as a bank.
What you’re thinking of is FDIC which is completely the opposite of a bailout for the bank. It’s a bailout for depositors (a huge portion of which were normal people). Arguments for the FDIC protecting people from keeping money in bad banks is a different argument, but it most certainly isn’t a bailout.
If you think going bankrupt and the FDIC seizing your company and wiping out shareholders is a bailout, you don’t know what a bailout is at all. That’s standard bankruptcy with an extra heavy boot on the throat from the government because they are ruthless about maintaining consumer confidence in the banking system.
I didn't say bailout. You said the government gave zero fucks but I think it actually went way above and beyond the normal FDIC insurance to make sure ALL depositors were made whole not just up to the normal 250k.
Pretty sure Boeing should have failed 3 times by my count.
On what financial grounds? When did they receive bailout loans or grants?
5-10 years is a perfectly normal investment horizon, and in the end investors are the ones electing the CEO and setting goals and rewards for the executive. If betting on the long term is a winning strategy companies absolutely have the means to do that. But right now it usually isn't.
Yeah, that's the real problem. Too much efficiency in the short term.
My idea on working around this: for any business with actively traded stock there is a salary cap, say $1m/yr *per year*. You want to pay that guy $10m/yr? No, you pay him $1m and he gets 9 sets of shares that are worth $1m now, but they will be delivered one a year. Next year, same thing, you give him $1m, one set of shares from the previous year is delivered to him, he's got 9 new sets coming. So long as you have such shares forthcoming you are not permitted to engage in any trade where you would gain from the stock going down. If you do so inadvertently (say, investing in a fund that shorts the stock) any income from that is taxed at 100%.
The idea is to make your top people care about the long term prospects of the company, not merely the prospects of their area for whatever time they're in charge of it.
Businesses won't plan long term or for black swan events if they don't have to; it is rational not to if they know a bailout is coming.
Businesses won't plan for black swan events when the people operating them have other sufficient wealth that the death of the company doesn't pose a serious problem for them. When CEOs make enough in a year to retire, there's no need to to worry about a potential catastrophic failure next year.
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I don't see why people can't comparisons shop for hospitals before they get in a car crash. Unless I am literally unconscious I would go to the hospital in my area that I trust the most, and I have plans for which urgent care, clinics and hospitals I would take someone else to if they needed a driver.
In fact I think a pretty small fraction of patients arrive at the ER unconscious.
How would develop the "trust" and why would it be correct? How would you diagnose yourself or others before selecting a hospital if those have different trust for different things? How do you balance urgency vs different trust levels if the hospitals are not all the same distance?
It also ignores that huge swaths of the country have no choice at all and the only hospital within a hundred miles is only viable due to huge Federal subsidies. We’ve been helping a close family member navigate that scenario and sure, he could vote with his dollars but it would involve a three hour drive to a neighboring state for an 80-yr old. I’d rather just enforce minimum quality standards on everyone like most other civilized countries rather then relying on “the free market” which so far in my experience has just led to PE goliaths swallowing entire health systems to focus on bill collection and union busting.
CMS does enforce minimum clinical quality standards on hospitals (at least those that accept Medicare). The problems in areas without meaningful competition tend to be more around shortages of qualified practitioners, high prices, and abusive billing policies.
I can't imagine anyone would object to minimum quality standards for anything receiving federal subsidies.
edit: didn't realize I was feeding a troll. Feel free to ignore.
I expect the objections are in how quality is measured and enforced.
It reminds me of education system in the US - most people (project 2025 aside) think it's good to have a public education system; having a pipeline of skilled workers makes it easier to build an economy filled with a diverse set of businesses.
However, the attacks start to fly when there is disagreement about who should be allowed to teach, how they should be measured, and how they should be paid.
Settling everyone's differences about rural medical subsidies might be a good stepping stone to an NHS.
You could ask the same questions about grocery shopping or buying a PC.
Just to be clear: You're asserting that the average citizen
Dietary and metabolic problems are an epidemic that outweights malpractice in terms of quality and quantity of life by more than two orders of magnitude - so yes, I am saying people face "shopping problems" of life or death magnitude every day.
A mis-assessment there might be far less consequential and those also do not require a medical diagnosis before making a decision where to go.
I've never needed a medical diagnosis to decide between calling my GP and going to an urgent care. It's just a bit surreal to hear everyone else say my ordinary survival skills are impossible and more than could be asked of anybody!
You said you have a hospital selected you trust (by whatever your metric is). Hospitals tend not be all equal for all things, so trust should probably be differential - how do you assess yourself as a patient then to decide on where to go? And if you do not differentiate the trust any further than to a single hospital regardless of what the issue is: why is that sufficient?
I think it is fine to have some preferences for a hospital, but not sure how much benefit that confers outside of some narrow situations.
Sinply replace hospital with any other service, take your own answers and then translate it back. In economic terms I researched medical facilities until the expected marginal benefit of the information fell below the marginal cost. There are a lot of reasons to reform the US healthcare system but you can't argue that consumer choice is too complex to be realized.
I don't know the US system well enough to say much about it.
The usual cycle for business in a free market is it appears young and fresh, lacking any parasites. It grows rapidly, displacing existing mature businesses. Then, it accumulates bureaucracy and parasites, becoming less and less efficient, strangled by bloat and inability to adapt, and slides into bankruptcy, replaced by the next generation of new businesses. The remains of the business are then reallocated to the next generation of businesses.
(This is quite unlike the common view that businesses inevitably grow to take over the world.)
I.e. business is much like a living organism.
Problems set in when the government bails out failing businesses.
Even worse are government "businesses". They are not allowed to fail, and the inefficiencies, parasites, corruption, grow and grow. When can you remember a government agency being abolished? Eventually, the government will collapse.
Not just government agencies. Everybody wants their finger in the pie to justify their job. And every politician wants to do things their voters like.
I'm thinking of a reasonably recent article I saw that was talking about helping people navigate the 30+ assistance programs they might be eligible for. There's your problem right there--there should not be 30+ programs doing approximately the same thing! That's an awful lot of duplication of effort.
Or look at what happens with business licenses. Two things I see:
1) They want their $ from entities that shouldn't really be "businesses" in the first place. Around here an awful lot of licensed professionals have to have a "business" license--never mind that the nature of their work means they're inside some other entity that actually is reasonable to license. And that means a sales tax registration which has an annual minimum that such people almost certainly will never reach. (Sales tax includes use tax--but it's their office that actually engages in such transactions.)
2) Businesses that perform their work on-site have to have business licenses for every license area of the metropolitan area they work in. Hey, guys, get together and define the superset of the rules of your area and allow someone to get a license that covers the whole area based on that superset.
The Republicans are "right" in that we have far too many regulations. But they are very wrong in wanting to take an axe to them--most of the rules are individually sensible (and when they produce nonsense it's often situations where it's not worthwhile to special case), there is a horrible problem of duplication of effort and fingers in the pie. It's not chopping that's needed, it's organization.
> When can you remember a government agency being abolished?
In the UK the last I specifically remember is DFID, which shut down in 2020.
> Even worse are government "businesses". They are not allowed to fail, and the inefficiencies, parasites, corruption, grow and grow. When can you remember a government agency being abolished?
In Commonwealth countries and the UK itself there are plenty of businesses called “crown corporations” which are owned by the government. Change in attitudes towards more liberalism led governments to deregulation and selling off bits and pieces or the entire corporation. Here are some Canadian examples:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-post-it-innovapost-s...
https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/march-2024/mulroney...
America is a relatively young country and has very peculiar philosophies sometimes not found in the rest of the world. Be very careful extrapolating an American perspective abroad or as capturing some elemental truth of the universe.
The problem with this is principal-agent problems. The owners of the business don't want it to fail. The people working there want to make money. They generally live their life and enjoy what money they make before the chickens come home to roost. It can be hard for the owners to realize the business is fragile before that fragility becomes apparent. In the mean time the people running the business made a bunch of money, potentially jumped to other jobs or retired or died.
And the owners could have sold when the business was propped up by unknown fragility.
Human lives are too short for these kinds of feedback loops to be all that effective.
One of the primary reasons people bail out companies are the knock-on effects. People losing jobs, etc. If society itself is robust enough to cover for people in those situations, we could let companies fail far more.
There's a sentiment on here often that, even if a company has been essentially blown up by technology or market change, they should have transformed themselves to adapt. But that implies they probably needed to rototill their workforce in any case. At some point, you're probably better off just declaring bankruptcy and starting fresh or letting someone else do so.
True, but for some companies there are also national security concerns. If we lose the domestic supply chain for certain items then that limits our freedom of action and leaves us vulnerable to supply disruptions.
If you depend on a single company to supply certain items, you have a big problem already. Pouring money in that company will mostly help the executive bonuses, not the national security.
People los jobs anyway, from the knock-on effects of the bail out. The bail out is more about controlling who loses jobs.
Socialized healthcare seems to kind of work in many developed economies - where does it struggle and by what metrics regarding the health outcomes?
I would love to see a good proof that it works, all the discussions, rumors and anecdotal evidence suggest the contrary. I am open to learn the truth, with hard numbers.
Very long waiting times are the first thing that comes to mind regarding such failures, with UK and Canada at the top spot. It is not uncommon to die waiting for a consultation to be diagnosed in 1-2 years.
What do you wanna good proof of? Life expectancy? What population health metrics do you want?
Almost all EU countries with socialized healthcare beat US and even UK. Canada is more near EU level.
Do you also want US anedoctal evidence? What’s the consultation time for diagnose in the US for people without insurance/ insurance doesn’t cover/insurance says it doesn’t cover/no money?? Never? How does that affect the average/mean?
Life Expectancy:
Italy 83.7; Spain 83.7; France 83.3; Sweden 83.3; Canada 82.6; Portugal 82.4; Germany 81.4; United Kingdom 81.3; United States 79.3; Poland 78.6;
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-unwpp?tab...
I don't think you'd see that kind of waiting times in Germany, for example (but Germnay also is at the high end of healthcare as %GDP).
Edit: I would also add that it is probably better to look at health outcomes, e.g., survival rates for cancer.
Sometimes insufficient capacity and long wait times can be the result of a government's agenda.
Here in BC, we have (mandatory) auto insurance provided by a crown corporation with a monopoly. The neo-liberal government before the current more socialist leadership hated it and wanted desperately to privatize car insurance. The problem is that ICBC is dearly loved by most residents here. There is a playbook for this problem.
They appointed a fairly incompetent civil servant to run things, and also started raiding the fund, to the tune of billions of dollars.
After about a decade of this, the company was a mess and nearly broke. They were forced to raise rates. The premier characterized the situation as a "dumpster fire" and editorials started popping up arguing for privatization.
That government was defeated, and the new leadership sorted it all out. Within a couple of years, drivers in BC were getting cheques in the mail because ICBC was making too much profit.
There are powerful interests very interested in getting a piece of healthcare in Canada, and some of the shenanigans you see here smell a lot like a set-up to make things become broken enough that the voters will demand privatization.
Just for one example, in the last few years staffing agencies have been hiring away nurses by offering higher wages and then contracting them back to the health authorities at ~$130/hr. This has cost billions to taxpayers and lead to great resentment within the regular staff.
Some folks somewhere allowed this to happen. Why?
That reminds me of a study on "lazy" ants as a reserve/replacement labor force. [0]
Maximizing efficiency in the short-term is not the same as maximizing survival in the long term.
[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170908205356.h...
We've seen this during the COVID pandemic supply chain disruptions as well, where just in time supply chain management doesn't work as expected when operating in an abnormal environment.
I'd always thought this conclusion was just a given.
Highly optimized systems take full advantage of their environment and rely on a high degree of predictability in order to avoid redundant operations.
These systems minimize the free energy in the system, and so very little free energy is available to counteract new forces introduced to the environment which act on the system.
You'll find parallels in countless domains, since the very basis for learning and stabilization of a system revolves around becoming more or less sensitive to a given stimulus. Examples could be attention, supply chain economics, institutions, etc.
I was gonna come here to say that, especially how there was a shortage on toilet paper. I remember reading it was becuase factories were so efficient that when people started using the toilet at home instead of the office, it was hard to switch the factories from making commercial to residential toilet paper. I think someone even made the pun of paper-thin margins.
It's not just Covid. Look at the medical world. Generic products compete on price and there is little profit margin--not enough to warrant overprovisioning against problems. And meeting FDA requirements for new activities means new players can't just jump in the game. (And we sometimes see this done maliciously--control all active production of something and shove the price through the roof.) One factory has a problem and there can be huge problems downstream as a result.
The only solution I see is for the FDA to include supply reliability in it's determination of whether a system is acceptable.
> We must (and will be forced to) backtrack on performance in order to become robust.
This is something that Nassim Taleb and the people working on https://realworldrisk.com/ have been saying for decades already.
Unedited bullet points on a related topic (same prefixes are linear, different prefixes connect to the others, but I haven't decided where yet):
>capital concentration increases
>expectations for what capital owners can do with money increases
>expectations exceed available capital
>investment returns must increase (race to the top)
>cooperation among capital owners must increase to get better returns
>capital owning group begins to self-select and become less diverse, if this wasn't already caused by the background/personality required to accrue capital
>investment theory converges on a handful of "winning" ventures
>because this is where capital is flowing, workers are forced to divert to these ventures
>competition increases, hyperspecialization increases
>expertise in and sophistication of other areas begins to decline, causing quality decline, garnering less investment; feedback loop
-----
*debt cannibalizes future productivity
-----
)diversity in capital ownership and management increases likelihood of diversity in investment venture target
)increased competition, increased likelihood that ventures will cover needs, decreased likelihood of overweighting in one area/overproduction
)solution: capital redistribution. Perhaps globally
> Contrary to common perception evolution does not optimise for high performance but high robustness.
It does both, eg. if the environment is stable then fitness is correlated with efficiency, if the environment is unstable then it's robustness.
The "slack" is important in an unstable environment because it allows for reallocation of resources without causing a system to fail.
It's tempting to minimize waste, but excess capacity is required to adapt if things are evolving quickly.
Plus, isn’t “physically impossible” a computer science argument, not a biological one? Unless we’re using the OG “physis”==“nature”, I guess
I don't know that the poly-crisis is bit this does feel timely.
I know I'd tolerate a digital experience of far lower fidelity (fewer pixels, for instance, or even giving up GUIs altogether) if I could get it in a way that doesn't break every time some far away person farts near a cloud console: A trade of performance for robustness.
The acceleration of knowledge is producing so much content, real gems are passing by unnoticed. Thanks for pitching in!
There are also a lot of engineering examples where the goal is to optimize for reliability. I think the most common domain is marine platforms where it is prohibitively expensive to induct and repair (you have to send a team out by helicopter, for example).
And yet most large merchant ships are designed with a single engine, propeller, and rudder to optimize for cost instead of reliability. We have seen some spectacular failures of that approach recently, although it probably still makes sense in aggregate.
A major mechanical casualty beyond what the crew can repair usually means a tow to a shipyard. Flying more engineers in by helicopter would seldom help, and often isn't feasible.
This is true, but different than the maritime platforms I was talking about. The ones that tend to focus on reliability-centered optimization are platforms used for drilling, not transport. Even then, you will see instances where they decide to optimize for cost/schedule (eg Deepwater Horizon). IMO, that is a company-cultural issue.
Btw- reliability optimization doesn’t necessarily mean it is optimized to not fail. They are optimized to fail within some predetermined risk level. What that risk level should be is an entirely different discussion.
The bridge that collapsed wasn't due to a single engine, propeller or rudder. It was due to a single electrical system. One intermittent electrical issue left the ship basically helpless even though all propulsion and steering was undamaged.
To a first approximation, humans have never lived in a world of abundant resources. That has mostly only applied to a minority of affluent people in developed countries. But resource abundance continues to improve on average worldwide.
Giving priority to performance may have made sense in a world of abundant resources, but we are now facing a very different period where instability is the norm.
Why do you think this?
I love the idea of ReZero, basically using a trainable parameter, alpha, in residual layers like this:
However, I haven't actually seen this used in practice. The papers we have on Gemma and Llama all still seem to be using layer norms.Am I missing something?
Isn't this already part of F?
Your sound system has a volume dial to turn up and down the gain of the track even though you could get the same effect by re-recording the track at a higher volume; isn’t that curious?
But I don't optimise my track to have an ideal volume. I do optimise my AI like that.
I should add that alpha is initialized to 0.
>> If you are a scientist looking for research ideas which are pro-social, and have the potential to create a whole new field, you should consider building formal (mathematical) bridges between results on overfitting in machine learning, and problems in economics, political science, management science, operations research, and elsewhere.
Translation to laymen: ML is being analogized to the mathematical structure of signaling between entities and institutions in society.
Mathematician proposes problem that plagues one (overfitting in ML, the phenomena by which a neural network's ability to generalize is negatively impacted by overtraining so the functions it can emulate are tightly coupled to the training data), must plague the other.
In short, there must be a breakdown point at which overdevelopment of societal systems or signaling between them makes things simply worse.
I personally think all one need do is look at what would happen if every system were perfectly complied with to see we may already be well beyond that breakpoint in several industrial verticals.
The exciting thing about this idea is if you can correlate, say, economics with the works of ML, that means a computer program which you can run, revise and alter can directly give you measurable data about these complex system interactions that mostly have existed as a platonic idea since reality is too nuanced and multiple to validate concepts formally.
With the idea that there is some subset of logic that sits below economics that is provable and exact. That is a powerful idea worth pursuing!
This idea has been pursued several times in the past, and it always ends up producing lots of interesting academic results and no practical conclusions.
It's certainly an interesting perspective on the development of complex systems. The idea that an economy can be somehow overfitted to its own incentives and constraints I don't think is entirely new, cf the Beer Game. But as a general concept, it's certainly not something that usually finds its way into policy discussion, beyond some very specific talk about reshoring of certain critical industries.
However, I think the most important benefit of this perspective is going to be providing yet another counterargument against the Austrian economics death cult.
It seems to me that something similar to Adam Smith happened to the Austrians: their ideas have been cherry-picked. According to German Wikipedia, their main things were / are a focus on individual preferences, marginal utility, and a rejection of mathematical modeling(!)
There was also something about lower state expenditures (...taxes...) giving better results for the people - that's the one that seems to be very popular with rich people for some reason. Go figure.
Austrian economics also rejects empirical assesment of its claims. Instead, universal thruths are derived "logically" (formal logic banned though) from "obviously true" axioms using a method called praxeology.
It seems a lot like Scientology: the more you learn about it, the more bizarre it gets. And of course it's used to extract a lot of money for few benefactors.
Unlike scientology, Austrian economics made some important contributions to mainstream economic understanding.
To be fair, Scientology never claimed to make any predictions about economics. (AFAIK, I don't know any Scientology)
Well if you can turn chatgpt into an intelligent actor in a simulated economy, and are able to run it at scale, I bet you can get some valuable insights.
More importantly, he invented diffusion models:
http://proceedings.mlr.press/v37/sohl-dickstein15.pdf
Brilliant enough to know he's helping build another atom bomb (presumably for peanuts)? And the nuclear briefcase is gonna be controlled by the ultrarich.
Adding to my reading list!
The argument rides on the well-known Goodhart's law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure). However, it only puts it down to measurement problems, as in, we can't measure the things we really care about, so we optimize some proxies.
That, in my view, is a far too reductionist view of the problem. The problem isn't just about measurement, it's about human behavior. Unlike particles, humans will actively seek to exploit any control system you've set up. This problem goes much deeper than just not being able to measure "peace, love, puppies" well. There's a similar adage called Campbell's law [0] that I think captures this better than the classic formulation of Goodhart's law:
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
The mitigants proposed (regularization, early stopping) address this indirectly at best and at worst may introduce new quirks that can be exploited through undesired behavior.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
> Unlike particles, humans will actively seek to exploit any control system you've set up.
But that’s only possible because the control system doesn’t exactly (and only) control what we want it to control. The control system is only an imperfect proxy for what we really want, in a very similar way as the measure in Goodhart’s law.
Another variation of that is the law of unintended consequences [0]. There is probably a generalized computational or complex-systems version of it that we haven’t discovered yet.
[0] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/540/handouts/french/unin...
Disagree. Even if it was striving to regulate exactly the right thing in the first place, most of these issues occur for systems where no single actor could be expected to exert complete control and could well be vulnerable anyway.
Start working with a nice, clean, fully relevant system, end up modelling that plus the whole range of adversarial perturbations from agents of pretty high complexity.
I don’t exactly see how this is different from what I was describing.
> Unlike particles, humans will actively seek to exploit any control system you've set up.
Well, agents will. If you created a genetic algorithm for an AI agent whose reward function was the amount of dead cobras it got from Delhi, I feel like you'd quickly find that the best performing agent was the one that started breeding cobras. In the human case and in the AI case the reward function has been hacked. In the AI case we decide that the reward function wasn't designed well, but in the human case we decide that the agents are sneaky petes who have a low moral character and "exploited" the system.
We have good reason to treat the humans as sneaky in your example, because they understand the spirit of the control system, and exploit the letter of it. The AI only understands the letter.
I think a big portion of that is humans don’t like to be viewed only as numbers and will rebel and manipulate any system you try to put the thumbscrews to them with. So the quote to mean rings golden and isn’t fallible to much of an extent
I might have discovered laws of agentodynamics:
1. "Agents want to retain or increase their agency"
2. "Agents will subvert rules that decrease their agency"
3. "Agents seek resources to increase their agency"
This field needs to be studied, I think I need to apply for a grant (3rd law says so).
This is true, these "laws" are approximations and imperfect reductions.
Which one is useful or descriptive will depend on the specific example.
Optimizing ML VS Optimizing a social media algorithm VS using standardized testing to optimize education systems.
There is no perfect abstraction that applies to these different scenarios precisely. We don't need that precision. We just need the subsequent intuition about where these things will go wrong.
I missed the citation on his education point. Has someone proved that “teaching to the test” leads to lower educational outcomes than not having tests?
IDK. I don't think we can actually have a discussion about education where all statements are supported by indisputable evidence.
There do happen to be citations for this question but I doubt any really clears an "indisputable evidence" standard. That's the nature of the field. Even if the whole discussion was evidence based and dotted with citations, we'd still be working with a lot of intuition and speculation.
Not a citation, but I believe it's a mediocritizing measure. For some teachers and some students, teaching to the test is probably better. I suspect more heavily concentrated in the bottom 50% of each group. For a subset of great teachers and great students, it's a detriment.
I saw some professors share the least about their tests to make sure we truly understand the material, sounds to me like a real-life usage of a train/test split. It’s not far fetched to think they employed this technique because teaching to the test didn’t work well by itself.
This has become a societal problem in Sweden during the past 20 or so years.
1: Healthcare efficiency is measured by "completed tasks" by primary care doctors, the apparatus is optimized for them handling simple cases and they thus often do some superficial checking and either send one home with some statistically correct medicine (aspirin/antibiotics) or punt away cases to a specialized doctor if it appears to be something more complicated.
The problem is that since there's now fewer of them (efficient) they've more or less assembly line workers and have totally lost the personal "touch" with patients that would give them an indication on when something is wrong. Thus cancers,etc are very often diagnosed too late so even if specialized cancer care is better, it's often too late to do anything anyhow.
2: The railway system was privatized, considering the amount of cargo shipped it's probably been a huge success but the system is plagued by delays due to little gaps in the system to allow late trains to speed up or to even do more than basic maintenance (leading to bigger issues).
There are examples everywhere. To quote Steve Jobs;
>When a company grows big enough, they want to replicate their initial success. They all thought about the "process" of how the first success was created. So they replicate those "process" across the company. And before very long the people confused that the process was the content.
And you can fit that from small companies to the world's largest government. Most of them forgot about their content.
I wish these were the biggest problems facing US train and healthcare industries.
Another example of this approximate law is in exercise physiology.
To a normal person, there are a lot of good proxy indicators of fitness. You could train sprinting. You could hop up and down. Squat. Clean and jerk.. etc.
Running faster,hopping higher, squatting heavier... all indicators of increasing fitness... and success of your fitness training.
Two points:
1 - The more general your training methodology, the more meaningful the indicators. Ie, if your fitness measure is "can I push a car uphill," and your training method is sprinting and swimming... pushing a heavier car is a really strong indicator of success. If your training method is "practice pushing a car," then an equivalent improvement does not indicate equivalent improvement in fitness.
2- As an athlete (say clean and jerk) becomes more specialized... improvements in performance become less indicative of general fitness. Going from zero to "recreational weighlifter" involves getting generally stronger and musclier. Going from college to olympic level... that typically involves highly specialized fitness attributes that don't cross into other endeavors.
Another metaphor might be "base vs peak" fitness, from sports. Accidentaly training for (unsustainable) peak performance is another over-optimization pitfall. It can happen when someone blindly follows "line go up." Illusary optimizations are actually just trapping you in a local maxima.
I think there are a lot of analogies here to biology, but also ML optimization and social phenomenon.
Clean & jerk is one of those movements that I would almost consider "complete". Especially if you are going to mix in variants of the squat.
Not sure these are the best example. I don't know of anyone who can C&J more than their body weight for multiple repetitions who isn't also an absolute terminator at most other meaningful aspects of human fitness.
Human body is one machine. Hormonal responses are global. Endurance/strength is a spectrum but the whole body goes along for the ride.
Perhaps. And you could probably test this but I would gamble that the principle still applies. IE, these weightlifters are probably also very capable (eg) shotputters because of all that weightlifting. But also... their shotput, sprinting and other tangential abilities probably peak at some point. From then on, they are mostly just getting stronger at clean and jerk.
> Hormonal responses are global. Endurance/strength is a spectrum but the whole body goes along for the ride.
This is true, and that is why most exercise is a general good for most people, and has similar physiological effects. However, at some point "specialization" (term of art), kicks in. At that point, a bigger clean and jerk no longer equates to a longer shot put.
Fwiw... This isn't a point about exercise or how to exercise. Most people aren't that specialized or advanced in a sport and the ones who are have coaches. My point is that the phenomenon speculated to be broad in this post applies (I suspect) to physiology. Probably quite broadly. It's just easy to think about it in terms of sports because "training & optimization" directly apply.
I agree with your overall point, but also the person you’re replying to. I think that clean and jerk may be the example that least supports your argument. If I had to optimize an athlete for one movement and then test them on 20, C&J would probably be my pick. Bench press would be lower down the list.
This isn’t just nit picking exercises here. There are some measures to optimize for that lead to broader performance. They tend to be more complex and test all components of the system.
IMO deadlift is another good one. If you could only do a single lift, I think you could make a pretty good case that it should be deadlift. Works damn near every muscle in your body, and gets your heart going pretty good too.
the deadlift has no pushing component and no coordination component. Clean and jerk is probably strictly superior
I think that's more an indication that "general fitness" is not a rigorous metric. It's fine as a vague notion of "physical ability" up to a point, and past that it loses meaning because improvements in ability are task-specific and no longer translate to other tasks.
Those are great points! Another related law is from queuing theory: waiting time goes to infinity when utilization approaches 100%. You need your processes/machines/engineers to have some slack otherwise some tasks will wait forever.
I’m remembering reading once that cities are incredibly efficient in how they use resources (compared to the suburbs and rural areas, I guess), and, in light of your comment about waiting time, I’m realizing why now why they’re so unpleasant: constant resource contention.
Amusingly this is something that I see as being a huge divide in rural and urban politics.
Yes, it’s inefficient. Yes, some people want that!
Right. Living is not an optimization problem.
Unless not until the oil and other essential stuff run out.
Our problem is not that we are running out of stuff, but that we’re drowning on it.
Sorry to put it so bluntly, but you're basically saying:
"I don't care it the climate's fucked, I want to live away from civilization and drive 100 miles a day everywhere"
Of course we shouldn't hyper-optimize everything, but sooner people realize our environment depends on not everyone getting exactly what they want whenever they want the better. Living in a (walkable) city is just one such concession towards the environment we ought to make, even if we don't "want" to.
Or we could just compete with each other for resources as we have since forever. I’d rather do that than have no choice but to live in Kowloon.
Just whack an externality tax on fossil fuels and things like cutting down wilderness, job done.
Or we can stop acting like there’s only two options: living in wide-open fields with a clear horizon or the fucking walled city of Kowloon.
Also, you have the mindset of a typical anti-social coastal elite who thinks “oh no big deal we can just raise the cost of living for all the poor rural types by sticking on a tax because I want to go LARP as a Victorian manor lord. And people don’t bend to my every whim immediately or live exactly like me so I want to be in total control of the 50 miles around me.”
Sure.
All I'm saying is that the efficiency arguments are silly unless you are comparing like for like. If we're suggesting that people simply do less because it's more efficient, well, no-one is going to do that without an incentive.
Everyone having 50 sqmi obviously isn't realistic (there actually is not enough space on the globe), but equally, if the idea is that everyone _has_ to live in a metropolitan apartment because each person has to use (1/7billion) of the resources, you're going to see an uprising, that just won't fly with people.
The best outcome is probably to convince as many people as possible to live in a shoebox so that the rest of us can still have a decent life. It seems to be working!
We're already competing under capitalism, and clearly the end-state isn't who'll get the most of what we already have, but who'll get the most of what's yet to get exploited. This competition doesn't have any upper bounds.
That’s not remotely what I’m saying. I live in a city and don’t drive most days because I can walk and take public transit and there’s never any parking. What I’m saying is that in the bigger picture, approaching life as a set of problems to be optimized is the wrong way to approach life.
If you think cities don't fuck the climate just as much as suburbs do I have a well you can carry water 40 flights of stairs from.
cities do because they exist in a system that generate carbon, but they are vastly more resource & carbon efficient than suburbs per person
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...
https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/01/06/suburban-sprawl-cancels...
Maybe, but the resources it takes to live are an optimization problem.
what it means to not optimise though is that some people end up better off and many others are worse off.
And what it means to optimise is also that some people end up better off and many others are worse off.
Yes, the point is to find a balance so that the first number is maximised.
On the other hand, in cities people are queueing up and talking at the bakery counter. While people in the suburbs are listening to the radio while driving to the bakery. I guess you choose to live where you feel most comfortable.
FWIW, my experience is that people are friendlier and more likely to make conversation outside of urban areas.
In fact that is also my experience but while urban people driving in the car they typically aren't talking to strangers
The efficiency results in abundance not possible in less dense areas, you are waiting for things that are simply not available elsewhere.
It allows for a greater variety of things (museums, concerts, etc.), but to get that you have to deal with higher contention and, thus, costs across all things (whether in terms of time spent waiting or money spent outbidding others), including, crucially, the things you consume the most of (roads, housing, etc.). So maybe a good way to think about it is: if you have a lifestyle that requires a modest amount of most resources, then the variety provided by density may be worth the increased resource contention, but if you have a lifestyle that requires a lot of certain resources (like space for kids), then the tradeoff may no longer make sense.
Sort of. Compare doing laundry at the laundromat to doing laundry in your basement.
They meant things like bars, restaurants, sports stadiums, concerts, plays. Things that require sufficient density to make economic sense.
LA has multiple of all of those and nearly entirely suburbs
Right, but if I had 1 hour in NYC versus 1 hour in LA how many clubs could I theoretically go to? Probably a dozen in NYC, provided I leave immediately. Probably about .5 in LA.
So while what you're saying is true, it doesn't disprove anything. LA is much less dense and therefore has much less "stuff" available for its inhabitants. But it's still more than a rural area.
Yep, I used to work in a factory. Target utilization at planning time was 80%. If you over-predict your utilization, you waste money. If you under-predict, a giant queue of “not important” stuff starts to develop
This reminds me of something my mother told me she aimed for when she ran her catering businesses: she always wanted 1 serving of pie leftover at the end of every day.
If she had 0, she ran the risk of turning customers away and losing money. Any more than 1 is excess waste. Having just 1 meant she’d served every possible customer and only “wasted” 1 slice.
And then you can eat the pie as a reward.
Customers don't want to buy the last one.
For some scenarios that's fine, and you can slash the queue whenever necessary.
Eg at Google (this was ten years ago or so), we could always spend leftover networking capacity on syncing a tiny bit faster and more often between our data centres. And that would improve users' experience slightly, but it also not something that builds up a backlog.
At a factory, you could always have some idle workers swipe the floor a bit more often. (Just a silly example, but there are probably some tasks like that?)
Unlike merchantmen, naval vessels were crewed at a level allowing for substantial attrition (bad attrition would be casualties; good attrition would be prize crews); I believe they traditionally (pace Churchill) had many, many activities which were incidental to force projection (eg polishing the brightwork) but could be used to occupy all hands.
Yes. And, well, you can also always train more. Especially in the age of sail.
I feel that a 100% efficient system is not resilient. Even minor disruptions in subsystems lead to major breakdowns.
There’s no room to absorb shocks. We saw a drastic version of this during COVID-19 induced supply chain collapse. Car manufacturers had built near 100% just in time manufacturing that they couldn’t absorb chip shortages and it took them years to get back up.
It also leaves no room for experimentation. Whatever experiment can only happen outside a system not from within it.
This is coincides with my headcannon cause of the business cycle.
1. Firms compete
2. Firms either increase their efficiency or die
3. Efficient firms are more susceptible to shocks
4. Firm shutdown and closures are themselves shocks
5. Eventually the system reaches a critical point where the aggregate susceptibility is higher than the aggregate of shocks that will be generated by shutdowns and closures
6. Any external shock will cause a cascade
There's essentially a "commons" where firms trade susceptibility for efficiency. Or in other words, susceptibility is pooled while the rewards for efficiency are separate.
It sounds similar to how animal/plant species often work.
A species will specialise for a niche, and outcompete a generalist. But when conditions change, the generalist can adapt and the specialist suffers.
*head canon
Something you personally (in your head) believe to be a general law, or rule, or truth (canon). It's roughly synonymous with "mental model".
A cannon is a weapon.
But in practice we see that:
1. Firms compete
2. Some firms get ahead
3. Accrued advantages to being ahead amplify
4. A small number of firms dominate
5. New competition is bought or crushed
6. Dominate firms become less efficient in competition-free environment
They aren't mutually exclusive. And, not xor.
If only that weren't called a "cycle" as if it had a predictable periodicity.
It has inevitability, but you're right, not predictable periodicity. Is predictable periodicity a necessary part of a cycle? I feel like the rise and fall of nations is a cycle, but not necessarily one of predictable periodicity.
If not predictability, then regularity, and I believe that's a fundamental misunderstanding -- the system is chaotic.
Good analysis, but one also needs to look at the definition of `efficiency`, what is your definition of efficiency in this context.
The ability to do more with fewer resources. Profit is a great starting point when answering, "What is efficiency to a firm?"
There is a fundamental tension between efficiency and resilience, you are completely correct. And yea, it’s a systems problem, not limited to tech.
There is an odd corollary, which is that capitalistic systems which reward efficiency gains and put downward pressure to incentivize efficiency, deal with the resilience problem by creating entirely new subsystems rather than having more robust subsystems, which is fundamentally inefficient.
This is exactly the subthread of this conversation I’m interested in.
Is what you’re saying that capitalism breaks down resilience problems into efficiency problems?
I think that’s an extremely motivating line of thinking, but I’ll have to do some head scratching to figure out exactly what to make of it. On one hand, I think capitalism is really good at resilience problems (efficient markets breed resilience, there’s always an incentive to solve a market inefficiency), on the other (or perhaps in light of that) I’m not so sure those two concepts are so dialectically opposed
To understand the effects, we first have to take a step back and recognize that efficiency and resiliency problems are both subsets of optimization problems. Efficiency is concerned with maximizing the ratio of inputs to outputs, and resiliency is concerned with minimizing risk.
The fundamental tension arises because risk mitigation increases input costs. Over a given time horizon, there is an optimal amount of risk mitigation that will result in maximum aggregate profit (output minus input, not necessarily monetary). The longer the time horizon, the more additional risk mitigation is required, to prevent things like ruin risk.
But here’s the rub: competition reduces the time horizon to “very very short” because it drives down the output value. So in a highly competitive market, we see companies ignore resiliency (they cannot afford to invest in it) and instead they get lucky until they don’t (another force at work here is lack of skin in the game). The market deals with this by replacing them with another firm that has not yet been subject to the ruinous risks of the previous firm. This cycle repeats again and again.
Most resilient firms have some amount of monopolistic stickiness that allows them to invest more in resiliency, but it is also easy to look at those firms and see they are highly inefficient.
The point is that the cycle of firms has a cost, and it is not a trivial one: capital gets reallocated, businesses as legal entities are created, sold, and destroyed, contracts have to be figured out again, supply chains are disrupted, etc. Often, the most efficient outcome for the system is if the firms had been more resilient.
So there is an inefficient Nash equilibrium present in those sort of competitive markets.
That’s a good clarification about firms vs. the broader system. I think that’s a pretty good breakdown, overall, and fits well with the general notion that capitalism is resilient, not efficient, by offloading efficiency onto smaller entities which are efficient, not resilient. You could compare to command economies where a firm failure is basically a failure of the state, and can destabilize the future of the entire system.
I mean, car companies also just straight out cancelled their chip orders because they initially thought people would stop buying cars during COVID.
There was a sci-fi series I read (I want to say by Alastair Reynolds) which talked about planet-bound civilisations having an innate boom-and-bust cycle where the civilisation would inevitably get more and more efficient at utilising resources, while thereby becoming more fragile and susceptible to system shocks. It would then collapse and eventually the survivors would rebuild.
You can add a measure of robustness to your optimization criteria. You can explicitly optimise for having enough slack in your utilisation to handle these unforeseen circumstances.
For example, you can assign priorities to the loads on your systems, so that you can shed lower priority loads to create some slack for emergencies, without having to run your system idle under during lulls.
I get what the article is trying to say, but they shouldn't write off optimisation as easily as that.
The problem is that people who agree to a task being low priority still expect it to be done in nine months and all of a sudden they become high priority if that doesn’t happen.
So you’re fixing the micro economics of the queue but not the macro. Queues still suck when they fill up, even if they fill with last minute jobs.
This totally depends on the system in question and what the agreements with your users are.
Eg if you are running video conferencing software, and all of a sudden you are having bandwidth problems, you typically first want to drop some finer details in the video, and then you want to drop the audio feed.
In any case, if you dropped something, you leave it dropped, instead of picking it back up again a few seconds later. People don't care about past frames.
(However, queuing instead of outright dropping can still makes sense in this scenario, for any information that's younger than what human reaction times can perceive.)
Similarly in your scenario, you'd want to explicitly communicate to people what the expectations are. Perhaps you give out deep discounts for tasks that can be dropped (that's what eg some electriticy providers do), or you can give people 'insurance' where they get some monetary compensation if their task gets dropped. (You'd want to be careful how you design such a scheme, to avoid perverse incentives. But it's all doable.)
> So you’re fixing the micro economics of the queue but not the macro. Queues still suck when they fill up, even if they fill with last minute jobs.
I don't know, I had pretty positive experiences so far when eg I got bumped off a flight due to overbooking. The airline offered decent compensation.
Overbooking and bumping people off _improves_ the macro situation: despite the occasional compensation you have to pay, when unexpectedly everyone who booked actually showed up, overbooking still makes the airline extra money, and via competition this is transformed into lower ticket prices. Many people love lower airfares, and have shown a strong revealed preference of putting up with a lot of stuff eg RyanAir pulls as long as they get cheap tickets.
A task "shed" is one delivered with infinite latency. If that's fine for you then the theorem doesn't hurt you, do what's best for your domain. It's just something to be aware of.
That tracks. I worked at a lot of places/teams where anything but a P0 was something that would never be done.
Solution: everything is a P0!
Then you just get Little's law, which is not usually what people want. Preemption is usually considered pretty important... Much like preemptory tasks.
No what you get is alcoholism. It was sarcasm.
Porque no los dos? The purpose of a beverage is what it does.
Interesting. My gut reaction is that this is true in reverse: infinite wait time leads to 100% utilization. However, I feel like you can also have 100% utilization with any queue length if input=output. Is that theory just a result of a first order approximation or am I missing something?
I think it comes from tasks not taking an equal amount of time, coming in at random, and not having similar priorities.
That's right, this is true no matter the queue length. If input=output on average, there is no limit on how long your queue will grow, and therefore no limit on how long queued task will wait.
I don't know what you mean by reverse.
The average queue length is still infinity. Whatever the queue length happens to be at the start, it will stay there, and it could be any positive number up to infinity.
Besides, angels can't really balance on pinheads.
For some it may go without saying, but for the uninitiated, y’all should be reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)
Slack __or__ lower priority tasks.
Tasks that never get done, yes. In other words, tasks that wait forever.
This is why I don’t like focusing on GDP. I think a quarterly poll on life satisfaction and optimism would be a better measure.
If you’re curious about GDP. I my car breaks and I get it fixed, that adds to GDP.
If a parent stays home to raise kids, that lowers GDP. If I clean my own house that lowers GDP. Etc.
Unemployment is another crude metric. Are these jobs people want or do they feel forced to work bad jobs.
I'm not really disagreeing (as GDP is a crude measure), but rather thinking out loud. I don't think my individual life satisfaction and optimism should be influenced by nation-state economics to the extent that that's what they're optimizing for. The job of my government is to create the conditions for security, prosperity and opportunity without oppressing the rest of the world or destroying the planet. But it's up to me to find a satisfying life within that and that is possible within drastically different economic and social structures. Similarly, there's probably not a set of conditions that gives universal satisfaction to all citizens, so what summary statistics of life satisfaction and optimism do we optimize for?
The point is it doesn’t matter what you measure
I find ironic that we are talking about ML where we have vectors of thousands of quantities and then we go to measure social/economic stuff with one (or a couple of numbers).
The general discourse (news, politicians, forums, etc.) over a couple of measures will always be highly simplifying. The discourse over thousands of measures will be too complex to communicate easily.
I hope that at some point most people will acknowledge implicitly that the fewer the number of measures the more probable is that it is a simplification that hides stuff. (ex: "X is a billionaire, means his smart"; "country X has high GDP means it's better than country Y with less GDP" and so forth).
> I hope that at some point most people will acknowledge implicitly that the fewer the number of measures the more probable is that it is a simplification that hides stuff.
But the larger the number of measures, the more free variables you have. Which makes it easier to overfit, either accidentally or maliciously.
Agreed, and that goes for capitalism at large.
Here's a rough outline for one proposed alternative to capitalism and the failed central planning alternatives of the past:
https://jacobin.com/2019/03/sam-gindin-socialist-planning-mo...
Some relevant snippets:
> Though planning and worker control are the cornerstones of socialism, overly ambitious planning (the Soviet case) and overly autonomous workplaces (the Yugoslav case) have both failed as models of socialism. Nor do moderate reforms to those models, whether imagined or applied, inspire. With all-encompassing planning neither effective nor desirable, and decentralization to workplace collectives resulting in structures too economically fragmented to identify the social interest and too politically fragmented to influence the plan, the challenge is: what transformations in the state, the plan, workplaces, and the relations among them might solve this quandary?
> The operating units of both capitalism and socialism are workplaces. Under capitalism, these are part of competing units of capital, the primary structures that give capitalism its name. With socialism’s exclusion of such private units of self-expansion, the workplace collectives are instead embedded in pragmatically constituted “sectors,” defined loosely in terms of common technologies, outputs, services, or simply past history. These sectors are, in effect, the most important units of economic planning and have generally been housed within state ministries or departments such as Mining, Machinery, Health Care, Education, or Transportation Services. These powerful ministries consolidate the centralized power of the state and its central planning board. Whether or not this institutional setup tries to favor workers’ needs, it doesn’t bring the worker control championed by socialists. Adding liberal political freedoms (transparency, free press, freedom of association, habeas corpus, contested elections) would certainly be positive; it might even be argued that liberal institutions should flourish best on the egalitarian soil of socialism. But as in capitalism, such liberal freedoms are too thin to check centralized economic power. As for workplace collectives, they are too fragmented to fill the void. Moreover, as noted earlier, directives from above or competitive market pressures limit substantive worker control even withinthe collectives.
> A radical innovation this invites is the devolution of the ministries’ planning authority and capacities out of the state and into civil society. The former ministries would then be reorganized as “sectoral councils” — structures constitutionally sanctioned but standing outside the state and governed by worker representatives elected from each workplace in the respective sector. The central planning board would still allocate funds to each sector according to national priorities, but the consolidation of workplace power at sectoral levels would have two dramatic consequences. First, unlike liberal reforms or pressures from fragmented workplaces, such a shift in the balance of power between the state and workers (the plan and worker collectives) carries the material potential for workers to modify if not curb the power that the social oligarchy has by virtue of its material influence over the planning apparatus, from information gathering through to implementation as well as the privileges they gain for themselves. Second, the sectoral councils would have the capacity, and authority from the workplaces in their jurisdiction, to deal with the “market problem” in ways more consistent with socialism.
> Key here is a particular balance between incentives, which increase inequality, and an egalitarian bias in investment. As noted earlier, the surpluses earned by each workplace collective can be used to increase their communal or individual consumption, but those surpluses cannot be used for reinvestment. Nationwide priorities are established at the level of the central plan through democratic processes and pressures (more on this later) and these are translated into investment allocations by sector. The sector councils then distribute funds for investment among the workplace collectives they oversee. But unlike market-based decisions, the dominant criteria are not to favor those workplaces that have been most productive, serving to reproduce permanent and growing disparities among workplaces. Rather, the investment strategy is based on bringing the productivity of goods or services of the weaker collectives closer to the best performers (as well as other social criteria like absorbing new entrants into the workforce and supporting development in certain communities or regions).
...
> No one paid greater economic homage to capitalism than the authors of The Communist Manifesto, marveling that capitalism “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.” Yet far from seeing this as representing the pinnacle of history, Marx and Engels identified this as speaking to a new and broader possibility: capitalism was “the first to show what man’s activity can bring about.” The task was to build on this potential by explicitly socializing and reorganizing the productive forces.
> In contrast, for Hayek and his earlier mentor von Mises, capitalism was the teleological climax of society, the historical end point of humanity’s tendency to barter. Hayek considered it a truism that that without private property and no labor and capital markets, there would be no way of accessing the latent knowledge of the population, and without pervasive access to such information, any economy would sputter, drift, and waste talent and resources. Von Mises, after his argument that socialism was essentially impossible was decisively swept aside, turned his focus on capitalism’s genius for entrepreneurship and the dynamic efficiency and constant innovation that it brought.
> Despite Hayek’s claims, it is in fact capitalism that systematically blocks the sharing of information. A corollary of private property and profit maximization is that information is a competitive asset that must be hidden from others. For socialism, on the other hand, the active sharing of information is essential to its functioning, something institutionalized in the responsibilities of the sectoral councils. Further, the myopic individualism of Hayek’s position ignores, as Hilary Wainwright has so powerfully argued, the wisdom that comes from informal collective dialogue, often occurring outside of markets in discussions and debates among groups and movements addressing their work and communities.
I was trying to remember where I remember where I heard of this author's name before.
Invented the first generative diffusion model in 2015. https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03585
And for me it was this ingenious 2019 paper co-authored by Stephan Hoyer and Sam Greydanus on doing structural optimization by employing a (constrained) neural network as a storage/modifier/tuner of the physical model describing the structure to optimize: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.04240 Super interesting approach and very well written paper.
This makes me think of going to chain restaurants. Everything has been focus-grouped and optimized and feels exactly like an overfit proxy for an enjoyable meal. I feel like I'm in a bald-faced machine that is optimized to generate profit from my visit. The fact that it's a restaurant feels almost incidental.
"HI! My name is Tracy! I'm going to be your server this evening!" as she flawlessly writes her name upside down in crayon on the paper tablecloth. Woah. I think this place needs to re-calibrate their flair.
I noticed an example of this rule at my local hardware superstore.
Around a decade ago, the store installed anti-theft cages.
At first they only kept high-dollar items in the cages. It was a bit of an inconvenience, but not so bad. If a customer is dropping $200+ on some fancy power tool, he or she likely doesn't mind waiting five minutes.
But a few years later, there was a change - almost certainly a 'data-driven' change: suddenly there was no discernible logic to which items they caged and which they left uncaged. Now a $500 diagnostics tool is as likely to sit open on a shelf, as a $5 light bulb to be kept under lock and key.
Presumably the change is a result of sorting a database by 'shrinkage' - they lock up the items that cumulatively lose the hardware store the most money, due to theft.
But the result is (a) the store atmosphere reads as "so profit-driven they don't trust the customers not to steal a box of toothpicks" and (b) it's often not worth it for customers to shop there due to the waiting around for an attendant to unlock the cage.
I doubt the optimization helped their bottom-line, even if it has prevented the theft of some $3 bars of soap.
It’s much more convenient to buy from Amazon than to try to find someone to unlock a glass case at the pharmacy. Especially since any pharmacy with glass cases for basic items will also be understaffed.
A few of my visits to this hardware store have been... memorable!
(1) locate the aisle with the item I want to verify it is still in stock
(2) spend 5 minutes wandering around the isles looking for a free attendant
(3) give up, press the 'service' button
(4) wait at the service desk for another 5 minutes until an attendant arrives to unlock the cage and hand me my $10 item
(5) have attendant inform me that he must immediately frogmarch me to the nearest self-checkout station, even though I had further items I wanted to buy. Otherwise, I would have a chance to secret the $10 item in my pocket, or to dash for the door?
(6) self-checkout and walk through the parking lot to place the item in my vehicle
(7) walk back to the store to buy my other items
(8) realize one of my other items is also locked in a cage
(9) got back to step (1) and repeat for a second item
I realize, as I type this, that the store has turned into the American equivalent of the British 'catalog merchant' except, in the UK, a catalog store gives you a numbered ticket, so the customer has, at least, a streamlined procedure and knows what to expect.
> they lock up the items that cumulatively lose the hardware store the most money, due to theft.
> I doubt the optimization helped their bottom-line
These seem to be in direct contradiction, unless you really think people have stopped going there because of it, to such an extent it outweighs the thefts. Especially when, if they stop going there, the competing local hardware superstore is probably doing the exact same thing. And remember, retail margins aren't usually huge -- for every item stolen, how many more do they need to sell to recoup the loss? Even if some people go to Amazon instead, it can still be worth it to avoid the theft.
It's much more likely that it has indeed had the biggest impact on reducing theft, and that your "discernable logic" simply doesn't have experience with these things -- that theft often isn't about item value, but rather about reliable resellability. A single expensive niche power tool takes a long time to resell; laundry detergent and razor blades can be unloaded in quantity the same day. People go through detergent and razors a lot faster than light bulbs.
I understand you dislike the inconvenience. But I really think you should be blaming the thieves or the factors behind theft, not the stores.
I doubt the optimization helped their bottom-line; I do not know it.
It is possible for a business to make money without customers actually liking the company: hey, it works for some of the FA*NG companies!
That said, there is something that feels 'off' about management obsessing over shrinkage to the point that the shopping experience begins to suck. It's not a truckstop or a drug store in a bad area... it's a hardware superstore.
With too much data, some manager can fixate on $3 screwdriver thievery and not think about the bigger picture: like shoppers finding the store to be a pain in the ass, and therefore no longer an attractive place to buy expensive riding-lawnmowers and floor jacks.
A store can quantify lower sales figures, but it may not be obvious that the lower sales were related to the choice of 'caged vs uncaged' inventory.
But again, I do not know. I only suspect.
I think it also applies to when managers try to overoptimize work process, in the end creative people lose interest and work becomes unbearable...little chaos is necessary in a work place/life imo...
I kill my desire to work on a lot of side projects by trying to over optimize the parts I’m not going to like doing. I should just do the yucky parts and get past them. But at least nobody is paying me to spiral.
Calling this the "strong version of Goodhart's law" was immediately brain-expanding for me.
I have been thinking of goodhart's law a lot, but realized I had been leaning toward focusing on human reaction to the metric as the cause of it; but this reminded me it's actually fundamentally about the fact that any metric itself is inherently not an exact representation of the quality you wish to represent.
And that this may, as OP argues, make goodhart's law fundamental to pretty much any metric used as a target. Independently of how well-intentioned any actors. It's not a result of like human laziness or greed or competing interests, it's an epistemic (?) result of the neccesary imperfection of metric validity.
This makes some of OP's more contentious "Inject noise into the system" and "early stopping" ideas more interesting even for social targets.
"The more our social systems break due to the strong version of Goodhart's law, the less we will be able to take the concerted rational action required to fix them."
Well, that's terrifying.
This reminds me of Eli Goldratt's quote: "Tell me how you measure me, I will tell you how I behave."
Parallel to Munger’s “Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome” which I think all of us have or will realize for ourselves at some point in life.
Corollary: "If you do not measure me, I will not behave"
Strictly speaking this is not the contrapositive and therefore the proof is yet to be seen. A sound corollary: "If I do not behave, it is because you did not measure me."
Is a contrapositive a corollary? P implies Q is logically equivalent to Not Q implies Not P.
A corollary would be some other relation that can be deduced as a result of P implies Q, not simply a restatement of P implies Q.
(Using the discrete math definition of imply, not the colloquial definition of imply).
Yes, a corollary can be just the contrapositive of something you just proved. Sometimes it's even more trivial, like a special case of a general theorem you proved.
A very common use is to re-state something so it's in the exact form of something you said you'd prove. Another common case is to highlight a nice incidental result that's a bit outside the path towards the main result -- for example, it immediately follows (perhaps logically equivalent to) something that's been proven, but it's dressed in a way that catches the attention of someone who's just skimming.
This is coming very close to denying the antecedent, one of the most basic formal logical fallacies.
No, I’m gonna do what I want to do. If you hire good people “what they want to do” is going to be what they think is right. Which may or may not be.
It's an effect that exists, but the examples aren't accurate.
An overemphasis on grades isn't from wanting to educate the population; obesity isn't from prioritizing nutrient-rich food; and increased inequality isn't from wanting to distribute resources based on the needs of society.
Living a well-lived life through culture, cooking, or exercise doesn't make you more susceptible to sensationalism, addiction, or gambling. It's a lack of stimulus that makes you reach for those things.
You can argue that academia enables rankings, industrial food production enables producing empty calories, and economic development enables greater inequality. But that isn't causation.
It also isn't a side effect when significant resources specifically go into promoting education as a private matter best used to educate the elite, that businesses aren't responsible for the externalities they cause, and that resources should be privately controlled.
In many ways, it is far easier to have more public education, heavily tax substances like sugar, and redistribute wealth than it is to do anything else. That just isn't the goal. It used to be hard to get a good education, good food, and a good standard of living. And it still is. For the same reasons.
When it comes to his Mitigation: Inject noise into the system. proposal: I would be happy to experiment with some sortition in our political systems. Citizens' assemblies et cetera.
Randomly chosen deliberative bodies could keep some of the stupid polarization in check, especially if your chances to be chosen twice into the same body are infinetesimal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
We tend to consider "democracy" as fundamentally equivalent to "free and fair elections", but sortition would be another democratic mechanism that could complement our voting systems. Arguably more democratic, as you need money and a support structure to have a chance to win an election.
Overfitting may be a special case of Goodhart's Law, but I don't think Goodhart's Law in general is the same as overfitting, so I don't think the conclusion is well-supported supported in general; there may be plenty of instances of proxy measures that do not have issues.
I'll also quibble with the example of obesity: the proxy isn't nutrient-rich good, but rather the evaluation function of human taste buds (e.g. sugar detection). The problem is the abundance of food that is very nutrient-poor but stimulating to taste buds. If the food that's widely available were nutrient-rich, it's questionable whether we would have an obesity epidemic.
We realize now or at least in recent past, the value of true nutrient-rich food or a balanced diet.
Carbohydrate abundance was likely important in moving people out of hunger and poverty but excesses of the same kind of diet are a reflection on obesity.
My guess is that calorie-per-gram-per-dollar of carbohydrates is still lower than fat and protein.
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I don't think it's unintuitive at all. 100% optimized means 100% without slack. No slack means any hitch at all will destroy you.
Indeed, the more efficient you become the more brittle you will be. You must depend upon the present being static and the future being perfectly predictable based on the events of the past. The present and the future don't merely need to be dependable within your own domain but also in the entire world.
The flexibility necessary to succeed in a real world requires a certain level of inefficiency.
Interestingly, the same effect shows up in communications systems. The more efficient an error correction code (ie. the closer it approaches the Shannon Bound), the more catastrophically it fails when the channel capacity is reached. The "perfect" code delivers no errors up until the Shannon bound then meaningless garble (50% error rate) beyond the Shannon Bound.
My point is that error correction codes have a precise mathematical definition and have been deeply studied. Maybe there is a general principle at work in the wider world, and it is amenable to a precise proof and analysis? (My guess is that mileage may be made by applying Information Theory, as used to analyse error correcting codes.)
An interesting idea but I'd imagine you would have to operate within something like the "100 year flood" boundaries that insurance companies do in order to define a constrained domain such as the Shannon Bound. I suspect you would also have to define the scope of this principle within the company and/or deal with the compounding effects of the multiple layers of the system and its "effective inefficiency."
I have heard this same criticism leveled at global supply chains as of the supply shocks of the early 2020s such as COVID, Ever Given, etc.
Yes, just-in-time supply chain systems often become over-efficient and brittle... usually because each link in the chain assumes that someone else is taking on the burden of inefficiency by having excess inventory in order to absorb shocks to the system.
That would assume your only target measure is efficiency, which would be a silly think to target in exclusivity of everything else.
“Hidebound”
The author identifies problems with a system measuring targets, but then all the proposals are about increasing the power and control of the system.
Perhaps the answer—as hippy sounding as it is—is to reduce the control of the system outright. Instead of adding more measures, more controls, which are susceptible to the prejudices of control, we let the system fall where it may.
This, to me, is a classic post of an academic understanding the failures of a system (and people like themselves in control of said system) but then not allowing the mitigation mechanisms of alternate systems to take its place.
This is one of the reasons I come to HN: to view the prime instigators of big-M Modern failure and their inability to recognize their contributions to that problem.
Loosening of control is exactly the answer, but the world pathology is currently that money/power/control are all unalloyed virtues to be pursued at any cost, so we'll have to wait for a global implosion before any of the Certified Geniuses on this site, or anywhere else, consider an alternative approach.
For an example of this, I recall reading a proposal that acts of Congress be strictly limited to be at most (say) 5 pages in length. This would be a natural form of regularization of the legislative power.
And that's leaving out Jevon's paradox, where increasing efficiency in the use of some scarce resource sometimes/often increases its consumption, by making the unit price of the dependent thing affordable and increasing its demand. For example, gasoline has limited demand if it requires ten liters to go one km, but very high demand at 1 L/10km, even at the same price per liter.
When people know the answer is always “no” they save their energy to plea for stuff they really can’t do without. You start saying yes and they’ll ask for more.
The trick is as always to find out the XY problem. What they really need may be way easier for you to implement than what they actually asked for.
Sometimes you can just embrace it, instead of looking for tricks.
If you are in the business of selling any product or service, then it's great that finding a way to make it cheaper also generates more demand for you.
I’m confused, because the “not trick” I’m talking about is the boondoggle created by giving people exactly what they ask for, making nobody happy and jamming up your throughput in the process.
To be specific: if you can find a way to make fridges for half the previous cost, and you can sell them for three quarters the previous price, you don't want to talk people out of buying more fridges. In fact, them buying vastly more fridges is exactly what you want.
And not necessarily the long term result anybody wants
Same happened with Walkmans or desktop computer, or mobile phones etc.
It's pretty normal that people want less of stuff when it's expensive, and more when it's cheap.
I mean I'm general, I'd rather buy fewer of the same things no matter if it's cheap or expensive if I didn't have to, and it would use less resources. Juicing someone's quarterly sales report is no good reason for me to buy a refrigerator, yet here we are.
Oh, you would already have other reasons to buy a fridge. They are really useful to keep things cool, and thus keep your food and drink from spoiling.
But (in our example) the high price of a fridge has so far kept you from buying one. Luckily, prices have recently been falling, so you can finally afford one.
You look forward to a new era of less spoilage and less food waste in your life; because you'd rather use less resources. (The electricity to be burned by the new fridge comes from your rooftop photovoltaic, of course.)
---
Does this make sense? You need have no regard for anyone's quarterly sales reports.
Yeah, but it is also second-order effects where the efficient use of a resource opens it up for more uses as well as for more exploitation. Perhaps this is most visible with farmland. Efficient use of water (center-pivot sprinkler) causes much more land to be arable, causing more use of that same water as well, depleting aquifers.
I was listening to an episode of the "inControl" podcast [1], in which Ben Recht suggested that overfitting is not always well understood.
Perhaps it is interesting to read his blogpost "Machine Learning has a validity problem" alongside this article.
[1] https://www.incontrolpodcast.com/
[2] https://archives.argmin.net/2022/03/15/external-validity/
There was no need to invent a new law named "strong version", it already exists: Campbell's law.
The subtle difference between the two being exactly what the author describes: Goodhart's law states that metrics eventually don't work, Campbell's law states that, worse still, eventually they tend to backfire.
I think of efficiency as one example where naive economic thinking has poisoned common sense. Economists view inefficiency as a problem. Because a healthy economy is efficient, therefore inefficiency is unhealthy. Any inefficient market is a "market failure". Efficiency is also the primary way a manager can add value. But the problem is, efficiency assumes existence of metrics, and indeed is counter productive if your metrics are wrong.
> Efficiency is also the primary way a manager can add value.
That's not right. The primary task of management is alignment.
> That's not right. The primary task of management is alignment.
Fair enough.. at least they think they can add value by improving efficiency.
It's a way they can add value. It's far from their primary way, and it's a task that is not primary done by management.
But yes, there are plenty of managers that focus on it.
I do like it when researchers try to connect the deep ideas within their work to broader more general systems, but caution is warranted to the optimism. This article is the kind of formal analogy that inspired/drove much of the marketing appeal of the Santa Fe Institute back in the 1980s. It's honestly always pretty fun, but the devil is usual in the details here (as is usual in making anything "work", such as self-organized criticality [1] which if you enjoyed this article you will also probably enjoy!).
As just one example to make this point more concrete (LOL), the article mentions uncritically that "more complex ecosystems are more stable", but over half a century ago in 1973 Robert May wrote a book called "Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems" [2] explaining (very accessibly!) how this is untrue for the easiest ideas of "complex" and "stable". In more human terms, some ideas of "complex" & "stable" can lead you astray, as has been appearing in the relatively nice HN commentary on this article here.
Perhaps less shallowly, things go off the rails fast once you have both multiple metrics (meaning no "objective Objective") and competing & intelligent agents (meaning the system itself has a kind of intrinsic complexity, often swept under the rug by a simplistic thinking that "people are all the same"). I think this whole topic folds itself into "Humanity Complete" (after NP-complete.. a kind of infectious cluster of Wicked Problems [3]) like trust/delegation do [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality
[2] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691088617/st...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem
This is super interesting. The author states "the strong version of Goodhart's law" as a fact, but does not provide a theorem which shows that it is true. This recent paper does the job.[0] The authors write about Goodhart's law in the context of AI alignment but they are clear that their theorem is much more broadly applicable:
> we provide necessary and sufficient conditions under which indefinitely optimizing for any incomplete proxy objective leads to arbitrarily low overall utility
> Our main result identifies conditions such that any misalignment is costly: starting from any initial state, optimizing any fixed incomplete proxy eventually leads the principal to be arbitrarily worse off.
[0]: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2020/hash/b607ba543ad05...
> Goal: Distribution of labor and resources based upon the needs of society
> Proxy: Capitalism
> Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Massive wealth disparities (with incomes ranging from hundreds of dollars per year to hundreds of dollars per second), with more than a billion people living in poverty
Please, show me a point in all human history when we have less than 90% global population living in poverty, pre-capitalism. Yes, there are 1 billion people (out of 8 billion) living in poverty today. But they were 2 billion (of 4.5 billion total) living in poverty as recently as 1980 (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/poverty-the-past-pres...).
Poverty is steadily going down (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/poverty-the-past-pres...) since we have data. The first countries to get rid of recurrent famines were the same that first adopted capitalism. The same countries where their population started having higher expectations than to live another day.
Paraphrasing Churchill about democracy, "[capitalism] is the worst economic system except for all other systems that has been tried from time to time".
There is no such thing as capitalism. “The first countries to get rid of recurrent famine” were those that began using the steam engine and field enclosure. These are not “capitalism”, they are “capital”, in tge jargon of the economist Marx, or, in modern parlance, technology. All of the parts of the world that are not starving are not starving due to their adoption of a variety of technologies, both mechanical and bureaucratic: fertilizer, machine tractors, and centralized governance using telephone lines and now internet. When people claim “capitalism” ended starvation, they ignore places like China and Russia which also ended famine despite adopting state ownership of farms. There was indeed famine during the transition period, but Russia ended famine by the 50s and China ended famine by the 70s, long before many “capitalist” countries in the 3rd world. That’s because the world isn’t about the phony field of “economics,” it’s about technology. Likewise, the other advancements of society that are claimed to be associated with “capitalism”—the end of smallpox and other old high-casualty diseases, the development of reliable air and trans-oceanic transport, instant global communications: all are due to the efforts of scientists working in labs mostly funded by governments and wealthy patrons, not “capitalism.” Capitalist enterprises almost never take major innovative risks. Even the latest glorious advancement that will doubtless be claimed by “capitalism,” Wikipedia-scraping chat bots, was developed by a non-profit.
Everything is about technology—stop letting economists drag you into stupid, poorly formed debates using undefined terms like “capitalism.”
Technology is a large factor but not the core driver. It's individual human motivation that drives the efficiency of the system. When you centralize the function of human motivation into a governing body like socialism aims to do, the goal is that the central body can optimize the system. However, the system is too complex and always misses something that was never predicted. When you "outsource" those motive drivers back to the people with capitalism you let the system optimize itself.
Capitalism was a huge invention that for the first time in history made people invest in capital. Previously, virtually all capital was the land. When someone had extra resources, they spend them either in buying more land (thus not creating new lands, but simply land changing owner) or buying non productive things like nobility titles, weapons, big palaces... The investment in "capital" was not usual, maybe from time to time someone bought an oxen, or a new plow, but it was not the norm.
The raise of capitalism, that indeed is such thing meant the raise of systematic investment in capital. The idea of risk investing in a machine that might have a ROI was new, and the idea that the extra money earned with that investment could be used to invest even more was radically new.
Is rich to claim that "China and Russia also ended famine by 50s and 70s". Each of them had a massive and historical famines as late as 1932 and 1960, and the famine was directly caused by their economic system, proving central planning as a failure: it seem to work until the planners make some error. When that error happens sooner or later, the failure is catastrophical and generalized. In fact, China partially abandoned central planning to raise from poverty in the 70's you menction as the end of China famines, when Deng Xiaoping said that a socialist state could use the market economy without being capitalist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_market_economy). The new system means that China is politically socialist, but economically at least partially capitalist. For example, it meant that farms no longer were owned by the state. Politically they did some words juggling of "socialism", "market" and "capitalism", but in practice they just adopted capitalism as the main capital allocating force. Central planning was abandoned in the early 90s, and they adopted a western-like planning (fiscal and monetary policies, with some industrial policies).
You play dirty when comparing China and USSR with "many [unnamed] countries in the 3rd world". We are trying to discover the best way to build a society. You choose your best example, I choose mine, and lets compare. It's a low blow that you can choose your best example and pit it to my worst (and probably not even representative). It highlights that you are not after the truth. You just hate capitalism and need to manipulate reality to "win" internet arguments.
You are making some strawman argument here. You claim that capitalism doesn't innovate or take risks, something that nobody claims! Here goes an example: oil cracking was invented in Imperial Russia in 1891. But due to lack of capitalist institutions, it has no use for gasoline: it was a refinery dangerous waste. For 20 years they had an invention in a box that served no one. In 1913, the process was re-invented in the US and was immediately put to work towards humanity advance: gasoline was needed for cars. One invention calls for the other, all of them guided by profit seeking.
Capitalism doesn't claim to be the source of advances, inventions or discoveries. It claims to be the best known way to put those advances, regardless who made them, in use. It claims to be the best capital allocator in existence.
“Though this pheonomenon is often discussed, it doesn't seem to be named. Let's call it the strong version of Goodhart's law“
I wonder why the author called it that way when this seems to me clearly derived from Ross Ashby‘s law of Requisite Variet[1], predating Goodhard by 20 years. As I see it, it is not even necessary to put more meaning it Goodhard as there actually is. Requisite Variety is sufficient. Going by his resume, I strongly assume the author knows this.
Russel Ackoff, building on countless others, put into two sentences for which others needed two volumes:
“The behaviour of a system is never equal to the behaviour of its parts. - It is the product of their interactions.“
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)
Love myself some cybernetics! All engineers are doing themselves a disservice by sitting here writing smooth-brained rants about “dumb MBAs making my job hard” instead of reading up on this field and understanding the true complexities that are inherent in people working together.
Agreed. I wonder if this is still the aftermath of the chasm which resulted when ‘Marvin Minsky et al‚ disowned Cybernetics, took some parts out of it and gave it a shiny new name.
Especially Systems Theory in its second manifestation (Maturana, Luhmann, von Förster, Glasersfeld - and Ackoff) is extremely powerful, deep and, reasons beyond me, totally overlooked.
Have to say tho, most MBA‘s I encountered sadly never ever heard of Cybernetics or Systems Theory. :-(
How has Systems Theory changed how you think? Is there a good book you recommend on the topic? Thank you!
I made a mistake here, leading astray. It's second-order cybernetics, not second order systems theory. I melted the two in my head, reason is that (Social) Systems Theory according to Niklas Luhmann [1] incorporates several parts of second order cybernetics (most of the people mentioned before show up there) and blends it all together to a point where I have difficulties to distinguish the separate parts.
This is all not 'new' in the literal sense. Luhmann died in the late 90s. I tried to come up with a spot-on-book of Luhmann, but that lead to nothing. It's all spread out (papers and books) as far as I know. There is a (transcribed) lecture given in 1992, which may come close, but I couldn't find a translated version of it.
One of the parts which hit home for me was the introduction of a differenciated form of distinctiveness, in turn partly enabled by the introduction of an observer, and observation in general. Heinz von Foerster gave an often cited sentence which I think fits the part, albeit Luhmann gurus will probably moan my simplification : "Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer."
Apart from that, sorry for not being more helpful here.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann
When we optimize we typically have a specific scenario in our head. With the proper tools one can probably make the mathematically optimal decisions to deal with this exact scenario.
However: 1) This exact scenario will likely never materialize 2) You have not good quantification of the scenario anyway due to noise/biases in measurements.
So now you optimized for something very specific, and the nature throws you something slightly different and you are completely screwed because your optimized solve is not flexible at all.
That is why a more “suboptimal” approach is typically better and why our stupid brains outperform super fancy computers and algorithms in planning.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this but this doesn't seem like an accurate explanation of overfitting:
> In machine learning (ML), overfitting is a pervasive phenomenon. We want to train an ML model to achieve some goal. We can't directly fit the model to the goal, so we instead train the model using some proxy which is similar to the goal
One of the pernicious aspects of overfitting is it occurs even if you can perfectly represent your goal via a training metric. In fact it's even worse simetimes as an incorrect training metric can indirectly help regularise the outcome.
You might be misunderstanding here what the "goal" is. Your training metric is just another approximation of the goal, and it is almost never perfect. If it is perfect, you cannot overfit, by definition.
No, because your training data is only an appropriation of the actual workload.
I would claim in a completely informal way that the optimal degree of utilization is ln(2)=0.693, around 70%.
This stems from the optimal load of self-balancing trees.
A little bit of slack is always useful to deal with the unforeseen.
And even a lot of slack is useful (though not always as it is costly) as it enables to do things that a dedicated resource cannot do.
On the other hand, no slack at all (so running at above 70%) makes a system inflexible and unresilient.
I would argue for this in any circumstance, be it military, be it public transit, be it funding, be it allocation of resources for a particular task.
I would put it at
As e^x is a commonly occurring curve and at that point its derivative goes below 1, meaning from that point on it's diminishing returns.I was thinking how this string of thought could connect to our daily lives. As a family with a toddler, if we fill up too much of our schedule/time in a day, a perturbation to the schedule can break everything. If instead we fill up 63-70% of the schedule and build in Flex Time, we're good!
Where e^-X and 1-e^-X intersect is 0.69. Mumbo? perhaps. Jumbo? perhaps not.
I don’t think the author understands what efficiency measures.
All of the examples involve a bad proxy metric, or the flawed assumption that spending less improves the ratio of price to performance.
The argument is that regardless of what metic is chosen, it'll create deminishing returns followed by negative returns.
What it means is the objective can't be static - for example once satiated, you need to pick different one to keep improving globally. Or do something else that moves the goalpost.
My take was that initially the metric is appropriate, but then with overfitting, it’s not enough.
It eventually becomes a bad proxy metric.
> [..] it signifies the level of performance that uses the least amount of inputs to achieve the highest amount of output. It often specifically comprises the capability of a specific application of effort to produce a specific outcome with a minimum amount or quantity of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort.
to quote wikipedia quoting Sickles, R., and Zelenyuk, V. (2019). "Measurement of Productivity and Efficiency: Theory and Practice". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Offering that criticism without clarifying what efficiency measures in your opinion doesn't allow us to follow your viewpoint without us just taking your word for it. Needless to say this isn't considered good style in a discourse.
A 100 percent "efficient" system can be one that is overfitted to certain metrics and it is the typical death sin of management to confuse metrics with reality and miss that their great numbers hollow out anything that makes a system work well and reliable, because guess what: having 1 critical employee and working them like a mule is good when things work, but bad when they suddenly don't, because that second employee you thought was fat that could be cut, was your fallback. In that case your metric of efficiency was slightly increased while another, less easy to quantify (and therefore often non-existent) metric of resilience went down significantly. This means if your goal was having an efficient and resilient company, but your metric only measured the former, guess what.
Same is true in engineering, where you can optimize your system so much to fit your expected problem, one slight deviation within the problem now stops the whole thing from working alltogether (F1 racing car when part of the track turns out to be a sucky dirtroad). Highly optimized systems are highly optimized towards one particular situation and thus less flexible.
Or in biology, where everybody ought to know that mixed woods are more resilient to storms and other pests, while having great side effects for the health of the ecosystem, yet in pure economic terms it is easy to convince yourself the added effíciency of a monoculture is worth it economically, because all you look at is revenue, while ignoring multiple other metrics that impact reality.
Accusing these examples of involving "bad proxy metric" is identical to the no true scotsman fallacy.
Might need to read some Goldratt. We generally don’t understand efficiency that well.
Yeah, every single example listed looks like gaming of bad metrics. Framing it as overfitting is unproductive, IMHO, and discounts the essentially adversarial context. I also discounts the stupidity of equating "efficiency" with a high score on a simple metric. Reality has a Surprising Amount of Detail, and all that.
gaming of metrics. Not of bad metrics. The point is all metrics will become bad because they will be gamed for.
This hits home. Management has started measuring things at my workplace. They won't admit it, but I said from the start it was because they are easy to measure, not because they are useful.
I am surprised that the author left out another mitigation. To build solutions (models) that are constructed to be more transferable (amenable to out of domain data). For example, in machine learning, using physics informed models. Perhaps this is simply a sign that the author is a proponent of generic, deep-learning.
Most people in ML, even if they are very proficient, don't understand why models should generalize out of domain. They just don't think about it.
Upon reading the title at first glance, I thought this was going to be how "effecient" computers nowadays. Such as MacBooks and such, who started this efficient computers thing in the recent times. And they are, but as a result computers are all worse off for it. I mean soldered RAMs and everything is a system on a chip.
The existence of the Framework Laptop proves that this is largely an imaginary tradeoff, or at least one badly taken by Apple.
Unfortunately once one company does something and gets away with it, or makes even more money, everyone will follow.
I was looking at Thinkpads and was somewhat shocked to see they started doing that too!
This is also why the libertarian solution to bad work environments “just leave” doesn’t work at scale.
That wouldn’t be worthy of the front page of HN. “I don’t like the current tradeoffs that laptop manufacturers make” has been talked through to absolute death. It’s the opposite of interesting.
If anything, there should be more space for this topic in our collective consciousness.
I find this article a bit odd, considering what the author is an expert in: generative imagery. It's the exact problem he discusses, the lack of a target that is measurable. Defining art is well known to be ineffable, yet it is often agreed upon. For thousands of years we've been trying to define what good art means.
But you do not get good art by early stopping, you do not get it by injecting noise, you do not get it by regularization. All these do help and are essential to our modeling processes, but we are still quite far. We have better proxies than FID but they all have major problems and none even come close (even when combined).
We've gotten very good at AI art but we've still got a long way to go. Everyone can take a photo, but not everyone is a photographer and it takes great skill and expertise to take such masterpieces. Yet there are masters of the craft. Sure, AI might be better than you at art but that doesn't mean it's close to a master. As unintuitive as this sounds. This is because skill isn't linear. The details start to dominate as you become an expert. A few things might be necessary to be good, but a million things need be considered in mastery. Because mastery is the art of subtly. But this article, it sounds like everything is a nail. We don't have the methods yet and my fear is that we don't want to look (there are of course many pursuing this course, but it is very unpopular and not well received. Scale is all you need is quite exciting, but lacking sufficient complexity, which even Sutton admits to be necessary). It's my fear that we get too caught up in excitement that we become blind to our limitations. Because it's knowing those limitations that is what gives us direction to improve upon. When every critique is seen as spoiling the fun of the party, we'll never be able to have anything better. I'm not trying to stop the party, in fact, I'm worried it'll stop.
> But this article, it sounds like everything is a nail
In the process, acting somewhat like a generalization of the problem it describes: overly precise and narrow approaches to "improve" ineffable qualities. But the author seems to understand that - he comments on the absurdity of some direct transfers of ML methods to real world problems. I think he just added a bunch of not necessarily well solvable, but particularly suffering from "overfitting", example problems. It's a food for thought article, not a grand proposal.
I think he agrees more with you than you think.
Evolution also picked it up as "satiation" - eating icecream feels good however you can't keep eating 1 per minute, same with pretty much everything.
In art it means not hijacking everything for some local maximum.
I think you're probably right tbh. But I do think this point could be stressed a bit more. Especially when we're talking about how easy it is to trick ourselves into thinking we're doing what's good enough.
You can also be too efficient in your career/life. You can take the "Inject noise into the system" as injecting positive randomness into your associations with people and ideas. If something seems slightly interesting but off your beaten track, learn more about it.
I have a pet theory that the state-planned economies failed not because they were inefficient (as neoclassical economics claims), but rather because they attempted to be too efficient. They tried to exactly calculate which producer needs what inputs, what they should produce and when, and a little deviation from the plan caused big cascading failures.
Free market is actually less efficient than direct control, but it is correspondingly more robust. This is evidenced in the big companies, which also sometimes try to control things in the name of "efficiency" and end up being quite inefficient. And also small companies, which are often competing and duplicating efforts.
The optimum (I hesitate it call that because it's not well-defined, it is in some sense a society's choice) seems to be somewhere in the middle - you need decent amount of central direction (almost all private companies have that) and redundancy (provided by investment funds on the free market).
(As aside, despite me being democratic socialist, I don't believe the democracy matters that much for economic development, but is desirable from a moral perspective. You can have a lot of economic development under authoritarian rule, there are examples on both sides, as most private companies are also actually small authoritarian fiefdoms.)
I recommend the book from Spufford (2010): Red Plenty on this topic.
- https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/red-plenty-fra...
- https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us...
On this side track to the discussion, I think that a major factor there was the location of decision making vs. where the action took place. Too much control was taken away from the location where it was needed.
Centralization does that, in general, not just in those countries.
There is a reason octopuses have sub-brains in their arms, and that some of our reflexes are controlled from neurons in the spine and not from all the way up in the brain, and why small army units have some autonomy.
Isn't centralized vs decentralized just another case of efficient vs robust?
If you want to make an optimal decision, you need to make it in a centralized fashion, in some form. But that also gives you a single point of failure.
> I have a pet theory that the state-planned economies failed not because they were inefficient
Well, a lot of it was corruption. A sufficient level of corruption can destroy almost any system, even if it had a well-meaning leader at the top.
That suggests a plausible mechanism for why the dissolution of the Union was so peaceful: faced with a call for glasnost' from Moscow, local leaders preferred to quietly leave?
Do we have any reasonable datasets for before-and-after corruption levels in the FSU, or would that be a project which would* need another 3-5 decades to be viable?
* in the absence of sufficient well-placed cabbage?
EDIT: circumstantial, but chin-scratch-worthy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasnost#Opposition (romania's post-communist transition was exceptionally** violent)
** here I count the stans as having suffered from preexisting violence
Related: "Dodo-Lean" by Darrell Mann https://www.darrellmann.com/dodo-lean/ , about systems which have been optimised into fragility.
Makes me think of: some of Taleb's ideas about just-in-time manufacturing (no slack eg covid supply shocks)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLLkWMDbC9ZNKbjDG/slack
Also, can't recall it but a long time ago I read a piece about how scheduling a system to 60% of its max capacity is generally about right, to allow for expected but unexpected variations (also makes me think of the concept of stochastic process control and how we can figure out the level of expected unexpected variations, which could give us an even better sense of what %-of-capacity to run a system at)
This is more a meta comment about the blog itself (as is customary for HN): I like the blog, there has been a lot of work put into it, so it makes me sad that it's hosted on GitHub pages using a subdomain of GitHub.io. When the day comes that GitHub inevitably kills/ruins Pages, because it _will_ happen, there is no question, the links to this blog will be stuck forever pointing to this dead subdomain that the author has no control over. We just have to hope that the replacement blog is findable via search engines, and hope that comments are enabled wherever the pages link is referenced so that new people can find the blog. An unfortunate mess that is definitely going to happen, entirely Microsoft's fault.
If he hosts his site on his own server, it will go down a few months after his death.
Assuming he's not 70, I guarantee GitHub pages will turn to shit before he dies.
But also fair point. I think we should all have a contingency plan I'm case of death, regardless of where our stuff is hosted. Self-hosted stuff indeed becomes a ticking time bomb after death. Even on 3rd party services, it's apparently a nightmare trying to get access to a deceased person's Google account, where Google Sites may live, etc.
Strengthening the importance of the Archive (the Wayback).
Efficiency tends to come at the cost of adaptability. Don't put it on rails if it needs a steering wheel. So many enterprises suffer from extreme rigidity - often caused by optimizations that lead to local maxima.
Metrics are ambiguous because they are abstractions of success and miss context. If you want a pretty little number, it doesn’t come without cost/missing information.
I don’t know if this phenomenon is aptly characterized as “too much efficiency”.
There is a book on this topic, "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned" https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-15524-1 There are many youtube videos where Ken explain those ideas, this one for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2I4E_UINRo
> FTA: This same counterintuitive relationship between efficiency and outcome occurs in machine learning.
The "examples abound, in politics, economics, health, science, and many other fields" isn't a relationship between efficiency and outcome, but rather measuring and efficiency, or measuring and outcome. I think a better analogy is Heissenberg's uncertainty principle – the more you measure the more you (negatively) affect the environment you're measuring.
This certainly tugs at all the right levers of the intuition. Not sure how to "buck the trend" in any established organization/regime to adjust expectations according to the theory. Looks like this might need to be demonstrated in the wild at a new concern or as a turnaround job, where the leaders could have a strong influence on the culture (similar to how Jim Keller steered AMD and is now steering TensTorrent).
In practice this is just Goodhart's law itself. It's not distinct. In Goodhart's law
> when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
If you ask someone "could you give me an example" you will see that in the example the measure that becomes a target is already a proxy. Even the example that the author presents, the good that cares a lot about testing its students... How does the school test its students? With exams. But that's already a proxy for testing students knowledge...
But overall excellent article.
Really interesting to learn about the ML perspective of the cost of localized efficiency. Local efficiency can also make things worse from a queueing theory perspective. Optimizing a process step that feeds a system bottleneck can cause queues to pile up, decreasing system-level productivity. Automating production of waste forces downstream processes to deal with added waste.
Efficiency means minimizing the use of the costliest components. It's installing fault points into a system on purpose.
Robust systems minimize fault points. Efficient systems come at the cost of robustness, and vice versa given a fixed definition of what is being conserved, i.e. costs or energy.
For example, a four cylinder engine that gets 15mpg will have a longer life than one that gets 30mpg, given the same cost.
Kinda surprised to not see anyone mention Jacques Ellul and his The Technological Society which highly revolve around this. Technological here does not refer to technology.
What do you think about Ellul's arguments in that book?
Efficiency is usually easier than effectiveness so it is optimised for much more and that spills over in the results and outcomes, of course.
There is a big difference between efficiency and effectiveness, and all system should focus on the latter rather than the former whether it's AI based or not.
There's a reason why the best-seller of self-help book for several decades now is the book by Stephen Covey entitled "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" not "Efficient People".
While this intuitively seems likes good idea, his real life examples are severely lacking. This gets interesting when we see where the rubber hits the road, the causes and effects of what is being optimized for vs what is happening and we look deeply into improving that scenario.
Really interesting article. Got me pondering the extent to which the peacock’s tail is an example of overfitting and Goodhart's
The female peacock is using the make peacock’s tail as a proxy for fitness - with beautiful consequences, but the males with the largest, showiest tails are clearly less fit, and more prone to predation.
That's the point. That they are alive shows that their innate fitness minus the tail is higher than that of another alive peacock who doesn't have a tail.
Or put another way: someone who wins the Olympic 100m sprint while hopping on one leg is a better runner that everyone else in the race by a wide margin.
Just add some measure of robustness to your optimization criterion. That includes having some slack for unforeseen circumstances.
And then you optimize around the slack, and we're back to step 1.
The slack is part of your optimisation criteria.
I thought that was the purpose of adding noise (in the mitigations).
Noise is one possible way, but not the only one.
Really interesting article. Got me pondering the extent to which the peacock’s tail is an example of overfitting and Goodhart's
The female peacock is using the make peacock’s tail as a proxy for fitness - with beautiful consequences, but the males with the largest, showiest tails are clearly less fit
There is research on costly signalling and evolution.
See also antifragility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility
In short, efficiency is fragile. If you want your thing to be be stronger after a shock (instead of falling apart), you must design it to be antifragile.
Note: it's hard to build antifragile physical things or software, but processes and organizations are easier. ML models can be antifragile if they're constantly updating.
Yes, extending the idea more broadly to society, health, politics, etc. sounds pretty much was Taleb has been doing.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. - Donald Knuth
Head and hands need a mediator. The mediator between head and hands must be the heart! - movie "Metropolis"
The statement overfits its own idea. Testing students is not an example of an efficiency
"Efficiency trades off against resiliency"
https://blog.nelhage.com/post/efficiency-vs-resiliency/
Kind of reminds of the cellular automaton, about how reducing the number of components can lead to complex worlds and rules. Maybe tangentially related. Conway game of life is another example.
Related is the book from deMarco (2002): Slack
https://herbertlui.net/slack-tom-demarco-summary/
“People under time pressure don’t think faster!”
Teaching is a terrible example. Teaching is actually more efficient when it is decentralised as the teachers can adapt to local environment and changes. With centralisation you have bad feedback loop.
"If you do not build the slack into the system, the system will take the slack out of you."
Can't agree with you more my friend. Another point on a philosophical level is efficiency or optimization in life, which always focuses on tangible aspects and ignores the greater intangible aspects of life.
Does being a super efficient AI researcher make everything worse?
It seems that this is related to the Tim Harford book Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives, but that book is not about deep learning.
Important subject, so-so blog post. This idea deserves further development.
The author seems to be discussing optimizing for the wrong metric. That's not a problem of too much efficiency.
Excessive efficiency problems are different. They come from optimizing real output at the expense of robustness. Just-in-time systems have that flaw. Price/performance is great until there's some disruption, then it's terrible for a while.
Overfitting is another real problem, but again, a different one. Overfitting is when you try to model something with too complex a model and and up just encoding the original data in the model, which then has no predictive power.
Optimizing for the wrong metric, and what do about it, is an important issue. This note calls out that problem but then goes off in another direction.
> Optimising for the wrong metric, and what do about it, is an important issue.
All metrics are wrong, some metrics are useful. Finding the useful one and then recognising when it ceases to become useful is the hard problem.
Very good characterisation of close, but distinct concepts. (a map of a domain)
If we squint a little, focus on close/far-away instead of same/distinct and s/metric/model/g (because usage of a metric implies a model), we can see how close these things can be.
Optimizing for the wrong metric - becomes “using a wrong model”.
Excessive efficiency - is partially “using a wrong model”, or maybe “good model != perfect model”. We start with good enough model, but after certain threshold we get to experience the difference between “good enough” and “perfect” (aparantly we care about redundancy, but it was not part of our model; so we were using a wrong model)
Overfitting is “finding the wrong model” (I wanted a model for the whole population, got a model only for a sample)
..or if we squint even more and go meta.. overfitting is part of “good model != perfect (meta)model” of modeling. (using sample data is good enough, but not perfect)
P.S. I liked the article. Choice of the title - not so much.
P.P.S. Simplicity of a model is part of meta-model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns
The author is a very sharp individual but is there a reason he insists on labelling overfitting as a phenomenon from machine learning instead of from classical statistics?
It might simply be that he didn't trace the etymology back that far.
If it turned out that the term actually started in tailoring before statistics really got it's feet under it (which I absolutely cannot say that it did, just that trying to extrapolate backwards that sounds like a reasonable guess) then it wouldn't speak poorly of you if you hadn't also known that.
The author is an academic, it is important to give proper credit for ideas within reason. Same reason I call F = ma the law of Newton and now the law of my high school physics teacher, even though I learned it first from him.
The reason I have this quibble is because the author says things like
>you should consider building formal (mathematical) bridges between results on overfitting in machine learning, and problems in economics, political science, management science, operations research, and elsewhere
If we are appropriately modest and acknowledge the fact that overfitting is well-studied by statisticians (although, obviously not in the context of deep neural networks), it seems kind of ridiculous to make statements like, economists and political scientists should consider using statistics?
The blog is mainly about ML - I don’t think the author alluded to overfitting having originated in that space; they just said it’s used extensively.
They don't say "classical statistics," but I don't see any implication that the phenomenon was born from machine learning, even if they say it's a common problem within machine learning. Maybe I missed it? They do mention modelling their conception of overfitting around Goodhart's Law, noting its origin in economics.
Gerrymandering is over fitting. Mitigation: randomize the actual shape of a district when the votes are counted.
If a citizen recognizes or intuits this to be a deep-seated problem of the political process, and if the only concrete influence this citizen can exert on the political process is choosing one of several proposed representatives, it seems rational to choose the most irrational, volatile, chaotic and unpredictable candidate.
The ideal choice would be a random number generator, but lacking that, he would want to inject the greatest dose of entropy available into the system.
Very interesting article. I don't get though for hotspot partitions they didn't use a cache like Redis.
Goal: efficient applications
Proxy: minimizing execution time of hot loops
Strong version Goodhart's: applications get incredibly bloated and unresponsive
From a social / emotional / spiritual/ humanistic perspective, this is what I see in the "productivity" and "wellness" spaces.
"Ahh, if only I hyperoptimize all aspects of my existence, then I will achieve inner peace. I just need to be more efficient with my time and goals. Just one more meditation. One more gratitude exercise. If only I could be consistent with my habits, then I would be happy."
I've come to see these things as a hindrance to true emotional processing, which is what I think many of us actually need. Or at least it's what I need - maybe I'm just projecting onto everyone else.
Some of us are trying to optimize for things other than happiness. An occasional bit of happiness can be a nice side effect of certain types of optimization but happiness isn't a reasonable goal to focus on by itself.
Happiness is a valid goal. If one perceives it’s not reasonable to expect it, then you may arrive at this conclusion. But imo that’s because we short-circuit happiness to sources of pleasure that we see aren’t that reliable.
Hell, even this settling for happiness as a side-product is a result of the judgement that this is the best we can do regarding the goal of happiness.
Everyone wants to be happy, and we can't all be right, right?
Well the use of the phrase “too much” already implies less than optimal. A self fulfilling prophesy by definition ?
I am skeptical of the analogy to overfitting, although I understand where the author is coming from and agree with the sentiment.
The basic problem is stupid simple. Optimizing a process for one specific output necessarily un-optimizes for everything else.
Right now much of commerce and labor in the United States is over-optimized for humans because tech businesses are optimizing for specific outcomes (productivity, revenue, etc) in a way that ignores the negative impacts on the humans involved.
The optimizations always turn into human goals, eg my manager needs to optimize for productivity if they want a bonus (or not get optimized out themselves), which means they need to measure or estimate or judge or guess each of their employees’ productivity, and stupid MBA shit like Jack Welch’s “fire the lowest 10% every year”) results in horrible human outcomes.
Sure there are people who need to be fired, but making it an optimization exercise enshittified it.
Same for customer service. Amazon wants to optimize revenue. Customer service and returns are expensive. Return too many things? You’re fired as a customer.
Call your mobile providers customer service too often? Fired.
Plus let’s not staff customer service with people empowered to do, well, service. Let’s let IVRs and hold times keep the volumes low.
All anecdotes but you’ve experienced something similar often enough to know it is the rule, not the exception, and it’s all due to over-optimization.
Remind‘s me of a quote from Donald Knuth: „Premature optimisation is the source of all evil.“
I like the connection between Goodheart's law and overfitting. However these examples are a reach:
--- Goal: Healthy population Proxy: Access to nutrient-rich food Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Obesity epidemic
I'm not sure I believe this one. Exactly who's target is "access to nutrient-rich food" and how would removing that target fix the US obesity epidemic? Is "nutrient-rich" a euphemism for high-calorie? My understanding is that there are plenty of places with high-nutrient food but different norms and much better health (e.g. Japan).
We can and do measure population health across (including obesity), this isn't a proxy for an unmeasurable thing.
--- Goal: Leaders that act in the best interests of the population Proxy: Leaders that have the most support in the population Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Leaders whose expertise and passions center narrowly around manipulating public opinion at the expense of social outcomes
Is this really a case of "overfitting from too much data"? Or is this just a case of "some things are hard to predict?" Or even, "it's hard to give politicians incentives." It'd be interesting if we gave presidents huge prizes if the country was better 20 years after they left office.
--- Goal: An informed, thoughtful, and involved populace Proxy: The ease with which people can share and find ideas Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Filter bubbles, conspiracy theories, parasitic memes, escalated tribalism
Is "the goal" really a thoughtful populace? Because every individual's goal is pleasure, and the companies goals are selling ads. So I don't know who's working on that goal.
Also it leads to a rigid system that is inflexible to deal with unknowns.
> Distribution of labor and resources based upon the needs of society
Not a goal for me, and not for evolution. Survival, health, prosperity, thriving and complexity rate higher. Not everyone makes it.
Thank you for acknowledging that your goal is to kill people. Now that that has been acknowledged, we can all ignore whatever else you have to say.
What gets measured gets optimized
Too much efficiency countering too much efficiency makes everything worse.
This whole thesis easily tips over into a semantic gobbledygook, as efficiency is not a property of the larger world, but an utter contrivance of thought.
Focus on anything to the exclusion of everything use and things are going wrong. How has the obviousness of this observation has turned into a breakthrough? AI is the perfect nexus for such a discovery: trying to optimize a system when you don't understand how it works naturally has pitfalls.
So what can it mean to try to mathematically formalize a misunderstanding? Maybe there's a true breakthrough lurking near this topic: that all understanding is incomplete, so look for guiding principles of approximation?
The author is right to call out the forest for the trees.
—
Web Design: The First 100 Years
https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
How the SR71 Blackbird Works
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gkyVZxtsubM
The author is right that we rely on metrics too much. But he's biased against capitalism and his proposed cure is more socialism. What's actually lacking is wisdom and integrity.
IMO the theory at the start of the post is well written and almost there, but it needs to more substantively engage with the relevant philosophical concepts. As a result, the title "efficiency is bad!" is incorrect in my opinion.
That said, the post is still valuable and would work much better with a framing closer to "some analogies between statistical analysis and public policy" -- the rest of the post (all the political recommendations) is honestly really solid, even if I don't see a lot of the particular examples' connections to their analogous ML approaches. The creativity is impressive, and overall I think it's a productive, thought-provoking exercise. Thanks for posting OP!
Now, for any fellow pendants, the philosophical critique:
The bad part of standardized testing isn't at all that it's "too efficient", it's that it doesn't measure all the educational outcomes we desire. That's just regular ol' flawed metrics. Again, overfitting isn't an example of a model being too efficacious, much less too efficient (which IMO is, in technical contexts, a measure of speed/resource consumption and not related to accuracy in the first place).Overfitting on your dataset just means that you built a (virtual/non-actual) model that doesn't express the underlying (virtual) pattern you're concerned with, but rather a subset of that pattern. That's not even a problem necessarily, if you know what subset you've expressed -- words like "under"/"too close" come into play when it's a random or otherwise meaningless subset.
I'd say that both the training and test sets are actualized expressions of your targeted virtual pattern. 100% training accuracy means little if it breaks in online, real-world use. I'd take this as proof that what we're really talking about here is efficacy, not efficiency. This is cute and much better than the opening/title, but my critique above tells me that this is just a wordy rephrasing of "different things have differences". That certainly backs up their claim that the proposed law is universal, at least!Lol. Nothing to do with efficiency, just humans recognizing incentives and acting in self interest.
I propose to denote the worsening trajectory by the term “enshittification”.
It would be nice, if us on HN, can crowdsource, some good KPIs/Proxies for the goals mentioned in the article.
These ones:
Goal: Educate children well Proxy: Measure student and school performance on standardized tests Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Schools narrowly focus on teaching students to answer questions like those on the test, at the expense of the underlying skills the test is intended to measure
--- Goal: Rapid progress in science Proxy: Pay researchers a cash bonus for every publication Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Publication of incorrect or incremental results, collusion between reviewers and authors, research paper mills
--- Goal: A well-lived life Proxy: Maximize the reward pathway in the brain Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Substance addiction, gambling addiction, days lost to doomscrolling Twitter
--- Goal: Healthy population Proxy: Access to nutrient-rich food Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Obesity epidemic
--- Goal: Leaders that act in the best interests of the population Proxy: Leaders that have the most support in the population Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Leaders whose expertise and passions center narrowly around manipulating public opinion at the expense of social outcomes
--- Goal: An informed, thoughtful, and involved populace Proxy: The ease with which people can share and find ideas Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Filter bubbles, conspiracy theories, parasitic memes, escalated tribalism
--- Goal: Distribution of labor and resources based upon the needs of society Proxy: Capitalism Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Massive wealth disparities (with incomes ranging from hundreds of dollars per year to hundreds of dollars per second), with more than a billion people living in poverty
---
I will start:
Goal: Leaders that act in the best interests of the population
Good proxy: Mandate that local leaders can only send their kids to the schools in their precinct. They can only take their families to the hospitals in their precincts.
perfect reminder that when you focus too hard on the proxy, you might win the battle and lose the war
Sounds like Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
"Efficiency" meaning, given some input cost, reducing the loss of applying that cost, toward some measured outcomes. High efficiency implies something about each of those three stages, none of which are reasonable to apply in all situations:
1. That the only input to the system is cost/money (or proxies of that, like compensated human time). Put another way: That the model you're working with is perfectly liquid, and you don't need to worry about fundamental supply constraints.
2. That the loss is truly loss, and there isn't some knock-on effects from that loss which might range from generally beneficial and good, to actually being somewhat responsible for the output metric, and your model is measuring the wrong thing.
3. That the output metric correctly and holistically proxies for the real-world outcomes you desire.
Using the example from the article on standardized testing: A school administration might make an efficiency argument by comparing dollars spent to standardized test scores.
* Dollars isn't the only input to this system, however; two major ones also include the quality of teachers and home life of the students. Increasing the spend of the system might do nothing to standardized test scores if these two qualities also can't be improved (you might make the argument that increasing dollars attracts better teachers, and there's some truth to this, but generally (even in tech) these two things just aren't strongly correlated; many organizations have forgotten what it even means to be "good at your job" and how to screen for quality in interviews. When organizations lose that, no amount of money can generate good hires because the litmus test doing the hiring is bad).
* "Loss" in this system might be the increase of funding without seeing proportionally increasing test scores; which does not account for spending money in extracurriculars like music, art, and sports; all generally desirable things we believe money should be spent on (isn't it interesting that we call these things "extra"curriculars?).
* Even if a school administration can apply this model to increase test scores, increasing test scores might not be an outcome anyone really wants. As the article says, all that guarantees is a generation of great test-takers. Increasing college acceptance rates? We've guaranteed a generation of debtors and bad degrees. Turns out, its impossible to proxy for the real world thing you want, in a way that can be measured on a societal level.
All of this is really just symptoms of the "financialization of everything", which has been talked about endlessly. In particular to this discussion, society has broadly forgotten about what the word "service" means; that public transit in your city must be a capitalistic enterprise, it itself has an efficiency metric that must be internally positive, because the broader positive efficiency impact that public transit network has on the people and businesses in the city, and thus municipal tax income, is too complex to account for within a more unified economic model.
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