
To Stop Cheating, Nuclear Officers Ditch the Grades - sizzle
http://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/334501037/to-stop-cheating-nuclear-officers-ditch-the-grades?sc=tw
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hliyan
In other words, you get what you measure. This is one of the reasons I
discourage measuring team performance in terms of bug counts or lines-of-code.
The former lead to what some call "issue-tennis" and informal fixes, and the
latter lead to code bloat. After years of trying, I've finally concluded that
"key performance indicators" attached to individuals or teams (as opposed to
artifacts and periods) usually leads to more trouble than they're worth.

~~~
mathattack
Here's the obligatory Dilbert ->
[http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/](http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/)

This sounds like a cheating problem, not a measuring problem. The same things
happens when people try to measure schools.

My sense is you can't give up on measuring things, because you can't scale an
organization without metrics. You just have to balance them with understanding
what is really going on. Or rather you need to have the metrics tell us
"What's going on with the business" rather than "What's going on with the
individual".

~~~
golemotron
You can't give up on measuring things, but you don't have to let people know
what you are measuring or make the measure materially to them. That's there
the trouble starts.

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mathattack
The challenge is then you lose accountability, and the ability for people to
work on what they are weak at.

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golemotron
There's a good argument that we shouldn't attempt to work on our weaknesses
but that we should work on our strengths instead. I don't have a link but I've
seen reference to this in research about performance reviews.

~~~
mathattack
I've seen similar. I kind of view it as "A couple As and a couple Cs are
better than all Bs" The one caveat is that you don't want any Fs. For example,
to be a great programmer, you don't need to be a great English writer, but if
you can't communicate at all, your work will suffer. There's a minimum level
after which it's better to focus on programming. If you're a great accountant,
you don't need to be a master of spreadsheets, but you need to be good enough
to get the job done.

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dan_bk
John Oliver (Last Week Tonight) has a good round-up:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-
yF35g](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g)

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thisjepisje
Classical example of Goodhart's law:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

~~~
teddyh
I would think that Campbell’s law is a slightly better fit:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law)

~~~
solarexplorer
And a good example is probably Google ranking...

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EGreg
"As a team, they need to make the right decisions, but as individuals they're
not required to be perfect."

So why not let them cheat like they do? That's teamwork.

Better yet why not have a computer program remember all these codes instead?

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albemuth
> Inside a full mock-up of a nuclear launch control center, Andrew Beckner and
> Patrick Romenafski practice the launch of nuclear weapons with the turn of a
> key

"Hey people, this isn't pointing to production, is it?"

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PythonicAlpha
Sometimes people can be like sub-atomic particles. You can't measure them
without changing them.

Any form of measurement will fall back on them that want to make the
measurement. You even can ruin company culture by having the wrong
measurement. I saw it happen, when people started to cheat on colleagues to
get better "performance".

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mkesper
The world could sleep better if those fatal missiles worldwide had a delay of
24 hours, at least.

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jedberg
So War Games was right then... We really do need to replace the officers with
computers.

~~~
arethuza
The Soviets did have an automated system that could launch their missiles
automatically:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_%28nuclear_war%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_%28nuclear_war%29)

It may still be operational, but not normally turned on - for obvious
reasons....

At the other end of the spectrum the UK has no automated control preventing
unauthorized launches (no Permissive Action Locks) and we check to see whether
Radio 4 is still broadcast to detect whether civilisation has ended and hand
written letters to instruct the captains of our Tridents subs what to do in
that event.

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soneil
(off-topic, but I find it fascinating)

The UK system sounds back-asswards, but it strikes me as a surprisingly sane
set of checks.

Man vs Machine has always been a royal navy doctrine. The US teaches nuclear
engineers how to drive a boat. The UK teaches sailors how to run a nuke.
Similarly, if the boat has to maintain independent firing capability (the
whole point of the deterrent being in submarines is to avoid command&control
decapitation), then any access control is a formality. If control ultimately
falls to the crew, then don't pretend it doesn't - focus on the men.

Radio 4 sounds anachronistic, but it's a UK-based, govt-controlled
transmitter, independent from military systems, which broadcasts every second
of the day during routine operation - and because it's still cranked out on
longwave (198?khz), can be heard across our waters & much of the north
atlantic (the stomping grounds of our deterrent).

While civilian maritime broadcasts would sound like a more sensible failsafe,
most of them are either broadcast or controlled from Northwood, so they're not
independent of military systems, and are routinely silent between scheduled
broadcasts.

What I do find interesting is the actual point of checking for civilian
broadcasts - given the loss or failure of command&control communications, the
result isn't a railroad to Armageddon - they're expected to implement some
common sense. Compare this to the scenes in Crimson Tide, where Gene Hackman
prefers blind obedience to the Protocol ..

And "hand-written" is a red-herring. The actual detail here is that only the
PM ever knows what went in that letter once it's sealed. They don't have to be
hand-written, and probably aren't anymore - but traditionally this was a side
effect of not dictating to a secretary/typist.

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ck2
We're pretty much guaranteed to have a nuclear accident at this point.

If ditching the grades is the answer to cheating, I say ditch nuclear weapons
to solve nuclear problems.

~~~
chiph
You go first.

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ck2
Half the world doesn't have nuclear weapons, they seem to be doing just fine
[http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-weapon-
free_zone](http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-weapon-free_zone)

~~~
sp332
Ukraine gave up their nukes on condition that their borders be respected, and
look what happened.

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gwern
You can't use nukes on some separatists and rebels, so I don't think that has
much of anything to do with it. Pakistan isn't exactly in great shape despite
having nukes.

