3 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2023
  2. Jan 2022
    1. Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".[1] It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who advanced the idea in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom:[2][3] .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

      We measure what we find important.

      Measures can and often become self-fulfilling targets. (read: Rankings and Reactivity by W. Espeland and M. Sauder https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/files/rankings-and-reactivity-2007.pdf)

      When a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.

      So why measure?


      Is observation and measurement part of a larger complex process which isn't finished until the process itself is finished?


      This seems related to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, Schrödinger's cat, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and the observer effect).

  3. Mar 2021
    1. This tendency is known as the “actor-observer effect”. What this means is that people often attribute their own behavior to situational causes, while observers attribute the actor's behavior to the personality or disposition of the actor. For example, an actor's common reason to be late is due to the situational reason, traffic. Observers’ lack of contextual knowledge about the traffic, i.e. common ground, leads to them attributing the lateness due to ignorance or laziness on the actor's part. This tendency towards dispositional attribution is especially magnified when the stakes are higher and the situation is more complex. When observers are relatively calm, the tendency towards dispositional attribution is less strong.[25]

      [[actor-observer effect]]