That is not true. State laws cannot interfere with the work of federal law enforcement, but can require certain behaviours.
Eg. States set speed limits. A federal LEO can break these when required for their duties (eg. chasing a suspect), but only when required (eg. if they are late for a meeting, they still have to obey traffic laws).
Body cameras do not seem to directly interfere with an LEO’s duty, unless “avoiding accountability” is literally their duty.
If it were a good metric there wouldn't be a few phone books worth of regulations on what you can do before and during running 100 meters. From banning rocket shoes, to steroids, to robot legs the 100 meter run is a perfect example of a terrible metric both intrinsically as a measure of running speed and extrinsically as a measure of fitness.
What do you mean? People start doping or showing up with creatively designed shoes and you need to layer on a complicated system to decide if that's cheating, but some of the methods are harder to detect and then some people cheat anyway, or you ban steroids or stimulants but allow them if they're by prescription to treat an unrelated medical condition and then people start getting prescriptions under false pretexts in order to get better times. Or worse, someone notices that the competition can't set a good time with a broken leg.
So what is your argument, that it doesn't apply everywhere therefore it applies nowhere?
You're misunderstanding the root cause. Your example works as the the metric is well aligned. I'm sure you can also think of many examples where the metric is not well aligned and maximizing it becomes harmful. How do you think we ended up with clickbait titles? Why was everyone so focused on clicks? Let's think about engagement metrics. Is that what we really want to measure? Do we have no preference over users being happy vs users being angry or sad? Or are those things much harder to measure, if not impossible to, and thus we focus on our proxies instead? So what happens when someone doesn't realize it is a proxy and becomes hyper fixated on it? What happens if someone does realize it is a proxy but is rewarded via the metric so they don't really care?
Your example works in the simple case, but a lot of things look trivial when you only approach them from a first order approximation. You left out all the hard stuff. It's kinda like...
Edit: Looks like some people are bringing up metric limits that I couldn't come up with. Thanks!
> So what is your argument, that it doesn't apply everywhere therefore it applies nowhere?
I never said that. Someone said the law collapses, someone asked for a link, I gave an example to prove it does break down in some cases at least, but many cases once you think more about it. I never said all cases.
If it works sometimes and not others, it's not a law. It's just an observation of something that can happen or not.
You're right. My bad. I inferred that through the context of the conversation.
> If it works sometimes and not others, it's not a law.
I think you are misreading and that is likely what lead to the aforementioned misunderstanding. You're right that it isn't a scientific law, but the term "law" gets thrown around a lot in a more colloquial manner. Unfortunately words are overloaded and have multiple meanings. We do the same thing to "hypothesis", "paradox", and lots of other things. I hope this clarifies the context. (even many of the physics laws aren't as strong as you might think)
But there are many "laws" used in the same form. They're eponymous laws[0], not scientific ones. Read "adage". You'll also find that word used in the opening sentence on the Wiki article I linked as well as most (if not all) of them in [0]
I disagree with all of those examples, they are misunderstanding what it means for the metric to break down in the context of the law, but alas. "If you run a different race" lol.
That's the key part. The metric has context, right?
And that's where Goodhart's "Law" comes in. A metric has no meaning without context. This is why metrics need to be interpreted. They need to be evaluated in context. Sometimes this context is explicit but other times it is implicit. Often people will hack the metric as the implicit rule is not explicit and well that's usually a quick way to make those rules explicit.
Here's another way to think about it: no rule can be so perfectly written that it has no exceptions.
could you explain what you think the difference is?
a metric is chosen, people start to game the system by doing things that make the metric improve but the original intent is lost. increasingly specific rules/laws have to be made up to make the metric appear to work, but it becomes a lost cause as more and more creative ways are found to work around the rules.
Exactly, that's the definition. It doesn't apply to timing a 100m race. There's many such situations that are simple enough and with perfect information available where this doesn’t break down and a metric is just a metric and it works great.
Which is not to the detriment of the observation being true in other contexts, all I did was provide a counter example. But the example requires the metric AND the context.
Do you know certain shoes are banned in running competitions?
There's a really fine line here. We make shoes to help us run faster and keep our feet safe, right? Those two are directly related, as we can't run very fast if our feet are injured. But how far can this be taken? You can make shoes that dramatically reduce the impact when the foot strikes the ground, which reduces stress on the foot and legs. But that might take away running energy, which adds stresses and strains to the muscles and ligaments. So you modify your material to put energy back into the person's motion. This all makes running safer. But it also makes the runner faster.
Does that example hack the metric? You might say yes but I'm certain someone will disagree with you. There's always things like this where they get hairy when you get down to the details. Context isn't perfectly defined and things aren't trivial to understand. Hell, that's why we use pedantic programming languages in the first place, because we're dealing with machines that have to operate void of context[0]. Even dealing with humans is hard because there's multiple ways to interpret anything. Natural language isn't pedantic enough for perfect interpretation.
Do you have an example that doesn't involve an objective metric? Of course objective metrics won't turn bad. They're more measurements than metrics, really.
I'd like to push back on this a little, because I think it's important to understanding why Goodhart's Law shows up so frequently.
*There are no /objective/ metrics*, only proxies.
You can't measure a meter directly, you have to use a proxy like a tape measure. Similarly you can't measure time directly, you have to use a stop watch. In a normal conversation I wouldn't be nitpicking like this because those proxies are so well aligned with our intended measures and the lack of precision is generally inconsequential. But once you start measuring anything with precision you cannot ignore the fact that you're limited to proxies.
The difference of when we get more abstract in our goals is not too dissimilar. Our measuring tools are just really imprecise. So we have to take great care to understand the meaning of our metrics and their limits, just like we would if we were doing high precision measurements with something more "mundane" like distance.
I think this is something most people don't have to contend with because frankly, very few people do high precision work. And unfortunately we often use algorithms as black boxes. But the more complex a subject is the more important an expert is. It looks like they are just throwing data into a black box and reading the answer, but that's just a naive interpretation.
Sure, if you get a ruler from the store it might be off by a fraction of a percent in a way that usually doesn't matter and occasionally does, but even if you could measure distance exactly that doesn't get you out of it.
Because what Goodhart's law is really about is bureaucratic cleavage. People care about lots of diverging and overlapping things, but bureaucratic rules don't. As soon as you make something a target, you've created the incentive to make that number go up at the expense of all the other things you're not targeting but still care about.
You can take something which is clearly what you actually want. Suppose you're commissioning a spaceship to take you to Alpha Centauri and then it's important that it go fast because otherwise it'll take too long. We don't even need to get into exactly how fast it needs to go or how to measure a meter or anything like that, we can just say that going fast is a target. And it's a valid target; it actually needs to do that.
Which leaves you already in trouble. If your organization solicits bids for the spaceship and that's the only target, you better not accept one before you notice that you also need things like "has the ability to carry occupants" and "doesn't kill the occupants" and "doesn't cost 999 trillion dollars" or else those are all on the chopping block in the interest of going fast.
So you add those things as targets too and then people come up with new and fascinating ways to meet them by sacrificing other things you wanted but didn't require.
What's really happening here is that if you set targets and then require someone else to meet them, they will meet the targets in ways that you will not like. It's the principal-agent problem. The only real way out of it is for principals to be their own agents, which is exactly the thing a bureaucracy isn't.
I've just taken another step to understand the philosophy of those bureaucrats. Clearly they have some logic, right? So we have to understand why they think they can organize and regulate from the spreadsheet. Ultimately it comes down to a belief that the measurements (or numbers) are "good enough" and that they have a good understanding of how to interpret them. Which with many bureaucracies that is the belief that no interpretation is needed. But we also see that behavior with armchair experts who try to use data to evidence their conclusion rather than interpret data and conclude from that interpretation.
Goodhart had focused on the incentive structure of the rule, but that does not tell us how this all happens and why the rule is so persistent. I think you're absolutely right that there is a problem with agents, and it's no surprise that when many introduce the concept of "reward hacking" that they reference Goodhart's Law. Yes, humans can typically see beyond the metric and infer the intended outcome, but ignore this because they don't care and so fixate on the measurement because that gives them the reward. Bureaucracies no doubt amplify this behavior as they are well known to be soul crushing.
But we should also be asking ourselves if the same effect can apply in settings where we have the best of intentions and all the agents are acting in good faith and trying to interpret the measure instead of just game it. The answer is yes. Idk, call it Godelski's Corollary if you want (I wouldn't), but it this relates to Goodhart's Law at a fundamental level. You can still have metric hacking even when agents aren't aware or even intending to do so. Bureaucracy is not required.
In a sense you can do the same thing to yourself. If you self-impose a target and try to meet it while ignoring a lot of things that you're not measuring even though they're still important, you can unintentionally sacrifice those things. But there's a difference.
In that case you have to not notice it, which sets a much lower cap on how messed up things can get. If things are really on fire then you notice right away and you have the agency to do something different.
Whereas if the target is imposed by a far-off hierarchy or regulatory bureaucracy, the people on the ground who notice that things are going wrong have no authority to change it, which means they carry on going wrong.
Or put it this way: The degree to which it's a problem is proportional to the size of the bureaucracy. You can cause some trouble for yourself if you're not paying attention but you're still directly exposed to "hear reason or she'll make you feel her". If it's just you and your boss who you talk to every day, that's not as good but it's still not that bad. But if the people imposing the target aren't even in the same state, you can be filling the morgue with bodies and still not have them notice.
> In a sense you can do the same thing to yourself.
Of course. I said you can do it unknowingly too.
> The degree to which it's a problem is proportional to the size of the bureaucracy.
Now take a few steps more and answer "why". What are the reasons this happens and what are the reasons people think it is reasonable? Do you think it happens purely because people are dumb? Or smart but unintended. I think you should look back at my comment because it handles both cases.
To be clear, I'm not saying you're wrong. We're just talking about the concept at different depths.
I don't think the premise that everything is a proxy is right. We can distinguish between proxies and components.
A proxy is something like, you're trying to tell if hiring discrimination is happening or to minimize it so you look at the proportion of each race in some occupation compared to their proportion of the general population. That's only a proxy because there could be reasons other than hiring discrimination for a disparity.
A component is something like, a spaceship needs to go fast. That's not the only thing it needs to do, but space is really big so going fast is kind of a sine qua non of making a spaceship useful and that's the direct requirement rather than a proxy for it.
Goodhart's law can apply to both. The problem with proxies is they're misaligned. The problem with components is they're incomplete. But this is where we come back to the principal-agent problem.
If you could enumerate all of the components and target them all then you'd have a way out of Goodhart's law. Of course, you can't because there are too many of them. But, many of the components -- especially the ones people take for granted and fail to list -- are satisfied by default or with minimal effort. And then enumerating the others, the ones that are both important and hard to satisfy, gets you what you're after in practice.
As long as the person setting the target and the person meeting it are the same person. When they're not, the person setting the target can't take anything for granted because otherwise the person meeting the target can take advantage of that.
> What are the reasons this happens and what are the reasons people think it is reasonable? Do you think it happens purely because people are dumb? Or smart but unintended.
In many cases it's because there are people (regulators, corporate bureaucrats) who aren't in a position to do something without causing significant collateral damage because they only have access to weak proxies, and then they cause the collateral damage because we required them to do it regardless, when we shouldn't have been trying to get them to do something they're in no position to do well.
> I don't think the premise that everything is a proxy is right.
I said every measurement. That is a key word.
I know we're operating at a level that most people never encounter, but you cannot in fact measure a meter. You can use a reference tool like a ruler to try to measure distance which is calibrated. But that's a proxy. You aren't measuring a meter, you're measuring with a tool that is estimating a meter. You can get really precise and use a laser. But now you're actually doing a time of flight measurement, where a laser is bouncing off of something and you're measuring the time it takes to come back. Technically you're always getting 2x the measurement but either way you're actually not measuring distance you're measuring a light impulse (which is going to have units like candles or watts) and timing it, which we then convert those units to meters. You can continue this further to even recognize the limits of each of those estimates and this is an important factor if you're trying to determine the sensitivity (and thus error) of your device.
So I think you really aren't understanding this point. There is no possible way you can directly measure even the most fundamental scientific units (your best chance is going to probably be a mole but quantum mechanics is going to fuck you up).
> The problem with proxies is they're misaligned. The problem with components is they're incomplete.
If you pay close attention to what I'm talking about then you might find that these aren't as different as you think they are.
> If you could enumerate all of the components and target them all then you'd have a way out of Goodhart's law.
Which is my point. It isn't just that you can't because they are abstract, you can't because the physical limits of the universe prevent you to in even the non-abstract cases.
I am 100% behind you in that we should better define what we're trying to measure. But this is no different than talking about measuring something with higher precision. Our example above moved from a physical reference device to a laser and a stopwatch. That's a pretty dramatic shift, right? Uses completely different mechanisms. So abstract what you're thinking just a little so we can generalize the concept. I think if you do then we'll be on the same page.
> In many cases
I think you misunderstood my point here. Those were rhetorical questions and the last sentence tells you why I used them. They were not questions I needed answering. Frankly, I believe something similar is happening throughout our conversation since you are frequently trying to answer questions that don't need answering and telling me things which I have even directly acknowledged. It's creating a weird situation where I don't know how to answer because I don't know how you'll interpret what I'm saying. You seem to think that I'm disagreeing with you on everything and that just isn't true. For the most part I do agree. But to get you on the same level as me I need you to be addressing why these things are happening. Keep asking why until you don't know. That exists at some depth, right? It's true for everyone since we're not omniscient gods. My conclusion certainly isn't all comprehensive, but it does find this interesting and critical part where we run into something you would probably be less surprised about if you looked at my name.
lru_cache has the benefit of being explicit about the replacement policy. So I find it more appropriate in cases where I want a size limit in the cache which, for me, is almost always.
I’m not sure use cases you see caches in, but any long running process should likely have a size limit on the cache.
This statement seems pretty poorly thought out. I think the argument that's being made is actually that there should be comprehensive privacy legislation, not that the TSA's use of facial recognition is bad/dangerous.
I see three risks being pointed out:
1. "the potential privacy and bias risks" -> however it doesn't expand or explain these risks. I'm on team privacy in general, so I definitely worry about this, but I think it's almost comical that any description of this risk is absent.
2. While facial ID is currently optional, "there is no guarantee that will remain the case" -> this is a textbook slippery slope argument, which means they're arguing not that the current practice is bad but that someday they might start doing something bad.
3. "the very real possibility that our face eventually becomes our default ID" -> another slippery slope argument that has even less to do with the TSA. This would require a major effort by the rest of government, so this is more a "watch out for that big cliff over there" argument than a slippery slope argument.
After all that, I think the topic sentence of this statement should be"
> This is [bad] because the United States lacks an overarching law to regulate the use of facial recognition to ensure the necessary transparency, accountability, and oversight to protect our privacy, civil liberties, and civil rights.
The slippery slope argument is a pet peeve of mine. It is a real, valid concern - in fact when this strategy works people often switch to calling it boiling the frog, which is not usually contested for some reason (even though it is the same thing)
Slowly making changes is a normal strategy at this point, saying anything less than the worst case is a "slippery slope" is no longer relevant imo. It is a valid risk that should at the very least be a point of discussion
Right. "slippery slope" is a fallacy only when the slipperiness of the slope is taken for granted. In this case there is plenty of evidence that this slope is in fact slippery.
Since I'm bashing on fallacies here, I'd also like to call out the naturalistic fallacy as a frequently abused one.
If your ancestors managed to survive in the natural environment, and there is something novel in the synthetic environment, then the synthetic alternative does in fact deserve more scrutiny because you have less evidence about it.
"Natural doesn't mean safe" type reasoning only really applies when the natural and synthetic thing are being put in equally novel situations--which is a pretty rare setup. Like, how often do you consider eating a plant which nobody has ever eaten before?
> The slippery slope argument is a pet peeve of mine.
Do you mean that an argument which consists of a claim of an inevitable slide to a bad conclusion from a certain starting point is your pet peeve? Or that a rebuttal to such an argument, which consists of pointing out that the former may be a slippery slope fallacy, is your pet peeve? It gets confusing because the key phrase of the former is "we're on a slippery slope", while the key phrase of the latter is "that's a slippery slope fallacy."
The slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy. However as you say, when incremental changes are regularly used as an effective strategy to obtain a larger objective it becomes a valid concern.
The logical fallacy still holds even if the majority of all policy utilizes the incremental strategy, but only because there are edge cases that invalidate the argument.
The problem for people outside of the strategy room, is that we don't know whether there is a broader objective or not, and even when a broader objective is realized it's almost impossible to prove that the end result was the original intent.
Even absent a broader objective we should still look to history and understand that government only ever increases its own power, only ever reduces the liberty of the citizen.
Government actions move in one direction, to yell into the void "well that is a slippery slope fallacy" as if that means we should simply ignore all of the lessons history has to teach us about giving up liberty for perceived safety is crazy to me.
I am not sure what value there is in proclaiming a slippery slope fallacy or how that it a rebuttal to the very real historical record.
I agree with you. My point was that using slippery slope to discredit an argument is frustrating because it is practically impossible to know in advance whether the incremental change is part of a bigger objective, and yet we also know that the strategy can work and has been used in the past.
It's part of a broader objective because many of these projects are fueled by both private organizations and public for-profit organizations. Yes, this is indeed part of a broader objective to sell more of this technology. Lots of ARPA money out and about right now.
> The problem for people outside of the strategy room, is that we don't know whether there is a broader objective or not, and even when a broader objective is realized it's almost impossible to prove that the end result was the original intent.
In some cases, folks are open about their broader objectives. Sometimes, we DO know their broader objectives, or at least we COULD know if it was widely (properly) reported.
In all other cases, we have no way of knowing the objectives of politicians and bureaucrats _tomorrow_, so we shouldn't presume they will have good objectives -- or rather, that we would think their objectives Good.
Never give the government power that you wouldn't want the most hostile political adversary to have.
>2. While facial ID is currently optional, "there is no guarantee that will remain the case" -> this is a textbook slippery slope argument,
And? Years ago you could say the same thing if OP complained about the TSA starting to use biometrics. And you would be disregarding their very real concerns, especially when they would have been right about them. I believe this is also the case now. OP has a valid point.
> you would be disregarding their very real concerns, especially when they would have been right about them.
Which TSA concerns were they right about and what dates?
Matching pictures doesn't indicate a person smuggling items onboard, and the hijack avenue ended on 9-12 when in-flight procedures changed. Ramp workers and flight crew, and even TSA, go around the TSA screening and can smuggle anything that somebody holding their family hostage at home tells them to carry.
They are piloting this at an airport near me. When I asked if I could opt out the employee said “no”. It was only later I was told that I could (upon returning home and looking it up)
FaceID as government ID is not a good idea, and it’s fine to start somewhere in my opinion though of course I would prefer outlawing biometrics entirely as identifiers.
Every article I've read about the TSA's program included the journalist either being denied an alternative to the facial recognition process or being pressured to do it. In an environment where being late for a plane could cost people their travel plans, coercion is pretty easy.
I fly a lot. I always opt out, usually in Atlanta but I think in other airports. There are signs up they say you can opt out.
This is both in the precheck security line and when boarding international flights.
It was an issue once with a Delta employee who didn’t know I could opt out. And once with border control in Ireland (where ICE has a presence). There, the ICE employee manually verified me but still insisted I get a photo taken.
Otherwise, it’s not been an issue to opt out so far. The staff might be a little annoyed, but it goes just as fast.
As an opposite point - the airports I've been to have been pretty easy to opt-out, though they usually have snippy comments about "saying it up front".
That being said, did your airport not have signs talking about the pilot, and it being optional? I would of pointed to that if I was told no.
It was very early in the pilot process, and I was trying to board an international flight. There was little or no signage, and the TSA staffer told me I could not opt out when I asked. Not a great experience. Since Senator Markey has been harping on this it has improved.
Even GDPR only applies to private entities, and the same polity who did that have used their willingness to regulate data handling and software architecture to, if anything, minimize end-user privacy vs. the state.
I haven’t read the underlying paper, but from the article it seems the paper looks at if a person gets healthier when they get married.
This seems flawed because you get older as you get married, which is generally something that makes you less healthy.
This does not seem to compare health between a cohort that stayed single and a cohort that got married, so I don’t place a lot of value on the conclusions.
Good point. The article wasn't clear on that, but I think the full study did do that (my emphasis):
> Marital Status: The main independent variable is a time‐varying measure of marital status at each interview, calculated from marriage dates in the 1985–2011 PSID marital history file. Observations were censored after the end of a first marriage to focus on health difference between married and never‐married adults. To account for cumulative health effects of marriage (Dupre and Meadows, [ 12] ), this variable distinguishes among being never married; being in a first marriage formed 0–4 years ago; being in a first marriage formed 5–9 years ago; and being in a first marriage formed 10 or more years ago. An alternative specification of this variable as continuous duration in the first marriage (equaling 0 in never‐married observations) led to the same findings.
> (Partial results): In OLS models for both men and women, any duration of marriage is significantly associated with a better (i.e., lower) score on the health scale, compared to remaining never married. The random‐effects models assess whether this association persists after controlling for respondents’ heterogeneity in underlying health status. With the addition of random intercepts, both the men's and women's models continue to show statistically significant associations between all marital durations and better health, relative to remaining unmarried, but the magnitude of the marriage coefficients is one‐third to one‐half smaller than the OLS estimates. Finally, the fixed‐effects models test whether within‐person change in marital status or marital duration is associated with improvement in general health. Among men, no such association is evident, while among women, only a weak protective effect of being married for 10 or more years is supported by the fixed‐effects model. While the latter finding is consistent with the accumulation of a protective marital effect at longer marital durations, the fixed‐effects coefficient (−0.06) is approximately half as large as the coefficients in the random effects or OLS models. Therefore, considering all birth cohorts together, within‐person improvements in health are weakly attributable to long marriages among women, but are not caused by accumulation of time in marriage among men.
Since when was I writing off FP? My main language for personal projects is Haskell. I was just pointing out that the category theory stuff isn’t really relevant at all.
> Is it black market when I pay the neighbor kid to mow my lawn and don't report their address? Nonsense.
No, but it is illegal for financial institutions (and many industries) to provide services without knowing who they are serving. Not sure how anyone is surprised that KYC requirements are coming for crypto..
Probably because banking stuff is cryptic and KYC sounds like something that is dredged in flour and 21 seasonings before being fried crisp instead of a very real obligation.
Eg. States set speed limits. A federal LEO can break these when required for their duties (eg. chasing a suspect), but only when required (eg. if they are late for a meeting, they still have to obey traffic laws).
Body cameras do not seem to directly interfere with an LEO’s duty, unless “avoiding accountability” is literally their duty.