Face it, people in general want and need a pecking order. Possibly because so many people are unsure of their own value in any given community. The worst offenders, IMO, are those who try to increase their rank in the order by lowering the rank of someone else. And too many of those who act like that at least succeed partially, again, I think, because so many people are unsure of where they really rank (could it be determined by a neutral outside observer).
Easier to pick on the easily cowed and unsure, but it's very bad behavior and seems to me to generally come from those who are not only unsure of their own value but are willing to bully others to cover up.
And my experience now comes from people 'arguing' about the "authenticity" of ethnic food. Get a grip, people.
I think a spelling bee is entertainment for the audience, in the same way that a basketball game is. I mean, there is nothing useful about throwing a ball in a basket, except to win a basketball game.
This was interesting to hear. I was at an event recently that has an embryonic A&S scene, and it had a contest that compared detailed weapons with an Alexandrian linothorax and various paintings; one of them won but I couldn't help but feel that there was no point to this, all the entries were good and we just needed many more entries above all else.
We didn't encounter confrontational authenticity police in our SCA. Much more common was for some senior people to discuss the failings of a newbie's garb/gear/etc. in the hearing of other newbies, thus impressing on them what behavior would get you scorned. But it was never to anyone's face. (My wife was much more sensitive to this sort of social pressure than I was.)
This happens all the time in the corporate world. Example: Transportation Procurement managers are frequently tasked with obtaining transportation services for cheapest cost. Ostensibly, quality of service is also mixed into this (on-time delivery, etc.), but the manager’s incentive (bonus) is usually driven primarily by cost savings. Measurement is some form of tracking cost per mile, cost per pound, etc. But did all the critical shipments get delivered on time? Or did a factory line get shut down at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars per hour? Did the cheap carrier you hired have inadequate liability insurance and now your company is also on the hook due to his accident with your freight in his truck? These are simple examples but demonstrate your point.
I'm casually Googling for clues how Goodhart's law has shown up in cybernetics and AI writing and lore. I remember that Norbert Wiener talked about meta-levels of control systems, where a (part of a) system could look at how well or poorly a metric chosen for feedback of a lower subsystem was performing, and adjust it.
(Come to think of it I've worked on a Kalman-filter-based weather prediction system that would adjust weights on the day-to-day predictor based on correlations over longer periods (the bug I was working on: occasionally a random filter would go into crazy oscillation).)
Here's a YouTube essay asking the most likely way (out of three categories) AI's could "get out of the box" and harm society. Ashley Hodgson is an associate professor of economics. She thinks the most risk comes from AIs tuning the metrics for picking doctors, credit scores, and so forth. A couple of wrinkles on Goodhart's law are discussed.
In the two instances I witnessed, the victims were both 20-something young women who looked unsure of themselves. A middle-aged man whose default expression is “Not Having Any”, as I was when I started playing, isn’t likely to be the victim of such bullying.
Both were at Val Day, which makes me wonder what they have in the water down there in Kalamazoo.
> And arts contests make little sense except as a competitive game; what does it mean to say that one entrant's sonnet is better or worse than another entrant's dress?
Hear, hear! (I do think bardic competitions in particular are meaningful and interesting, though. This definitely isn't an attempt to get more people to sing at events ;) )
Face it, people in general want and need a pecking order. Possibly because so many people are unsure of their own value in any given community. The worst offenders, IMO, are those who try to increase their rank in the order by lowering the rank of someone else. And too many of those who act like that at least succeed partially, again, I think, because so many people are unsure of where they really rank (could it be determined by a neutral outside observer).
Easier to pick on the easily cowed and unsure, but it's very bad behavior and seems to me to generally come from those who are not only unsure of their own value but are willing to bully others to cover up.
And my experience now comes from people 'arguing' about the "authenticity" of ethnic food. Get a grip, people.
I think a spelling bee is entertainment for the audience, in the same way that a basketball game is. I mean, there is nothing useful about throwing a ball in a basket, except to win a basketball game.
This was interesting to hear. I was at an event recently that has an embryonic A&S scene, and it had a contest that compared detailed weapons with an Alexandrian linothorax and various paintings; one of them won but I couldn't help but feel that there was no point to this, all the entries were good and we just needed many more entries above all else.
We didn't encounter confrontational authenticity police in our SCA. Much more common was for some senior people to discuss the failings of a newbie's garb/gear/etc. in the hearing of other newbies, thus impressing on them what behavior would get you scorned. But it was never to anyone's face. (My wife was much more sensitive to this sort of social pressure than I was.)
This happens all the time in the corporate world. Example: Transportation Procurement managers are frequently tasked with obtaining transportation services for cheapest cost. Ostensibly, quality of service is also mixed into this (on-time delivery, etc.), but the manager’s incentive (bonus) is usually driven primarily by cost savings. Measurement is some form of tracking cost per mile, cost per pound, etc. But did all the critical shipments get delivered on time? Or did a factory line get shut down at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars per hour? Did the cheap carrier you hired have inadequate liability insurance and now your company is also on the hook due to his accident with your freight in his truck? These are simple examples but demonstrate your point.
I'm casually Googling for clues how Goodhart's law has shown up in cybernetics and AI writing and lore. I remember that Norbert Wiener talked about meta-levels of control systems, where a (part of a) system could look at how well or poorly a metric chosen for feedback of a lower subsystem was performing, and adjust it.
(Come to think of it I've worked on a Kalman-filter-based weather prediction system that would adjust weights on the day-to-day predictor based on correlations over longer periods (the bug I was working on: occasionally a random filter would go into crazy oscillation).)
Here's a YouTube essay asking the most likely way (out of three categories) AI's could "get out of the box" and harm society. Ashley Hodgson is an associate professor of economics. She thinks the most risk comes from AIs tuning the metrics for picking doctors, credit scores, and so forth. A couple of wrinkles on Goodhart's law are discussed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6OpjNT59pQ
Btw, I find it encouraging how much and how accurately "gaming the system" has been taken up in smart conversation.
In the two instances I witnessed, the victims were both 20-something young women who looked unsure of themselves. A middle-aged man whose default expression is “Not Having Any”, as I was when I started playing, isn’t likely to be the victim of such bullying.
Both were at Val Day, which makes me wonder what they have in the water down there in Kalamazoo.
> And arts contests make little sense except as a competitive game; what does it mean to say that one entrant's sonnet is better or worse than another entrant's dress?
Hear, hear! (I do think bardic competitions in particular are meaningful and interesting, though. This definitely isn't an attempt to get more people to sing at events ;) )