
The Data/Human Goal Gap - NaOH
http://ken.arneson.name/2016/06/the-data-human-goal-gap
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gipp
He's right, it _does_ already have a name. A few, in fact.

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

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projektfu
I think Goodhart's law is closest to what he is getting at. There is also the
aphorism of Deming, that the most important figures for managing your business
are unknown and unknowable. We want to measure successful learning. Instead,
we measure test scores. Whatever figures actually measure successful learning
are unknown and likely unknowable. "Management", in this case the parents,
teachers and administration, are focused on test scores and other marks of
achievement. College admissions departments have their own measures that may
include all of these things. But, in the end, hitting high values for these
targets may not be reaching the actual goal. It's a good way of looking at an
age-old problem.

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pm
I imagine this is a corollary of the phrase, "you manage what you measure."

Usually the metrics we measure are an indirect substitute for what we actually
want to measure, e.g., lines of code as a measure of programmer productivity.
What inevitably happens is that behaviour is optimised for the metric, and not
what the metric was intending to measure. It's really just gaming the system.

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rajanchandi
One solution to this problem is making "flipped classroom" a mandatory at all
the schools.i.e. students go thru lectures/videos at home and do homework
collaboratively in the Classroom. The Real world is more collaborative
compared to our schools. Flipped Classroom is proven to increase scores as
well. Question: What efforts are you willing to put in making this happen?

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douche
> The Real world is more collaborative compared to our schools

People keep saying this. I must be living in a different shard of the real
world than those people. Collaboration is nice, but at the end of the day, the
work has to actually be done, not just talked about.

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jeffbr13
Distinguishing between work requiring a heads-down approach and work that can
be sped up by collaboration (shared understanding, parallelisable tasks) needs
to be learned and school's a good a place to get started on that as any.

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michaelfeathers
I used to call them 'Prosthetic Goals'
[http://michaelfeathers.typepad.com/michael_feathers_blog/200...](http://michaelfeathers.typepad.com/michael_feathers_blog/2007/07/prosthetic-
goal.html)

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yummyfajitas
Tl;dr if you don't know what your goals are, you won't achieve them. Shocking!

Though in half his examples (education, politics, baseball), the complaint
actually seems to be "other people don't share my goals".

What this has to do with measurement, I have no idea. Would this problem occur
less if we non-quantitatively tried to achieve the wrong goal?

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xivzgrev
the complaint actually seems to be "other people don't share my goals

I guess. But i think what he is driving at is, in data driven world, we can
lose sight of bigger picture ie in quest for test scores we can unreasonably
stress kids out, in quest for profits we can shit on employees and the
environment, etc.

Just taking the last point, people generally like parks and nature. What
person would say "oh yes id love to pollute my closest river?"

but then suppose you ran a factory on a river, and it would cost your company
90% of profits to dispose of your factory's waste in an environmentally sound
way, and you are measured on how much profits you bring in. Or you can dump in
the river for free.

Would you choose to dump your waste into the river? I think most people would.

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prawn
I'd like to think that most people wouldn't. I'd rather run no business at
all.

