I’m sure this phenomenon has a name by now, but I’m struggling to find it. What is it called when requirements are applied to an excess of applicants solely for the purpose of whittling them down to a manageable number, but doing so either filters no better than chance or actively eliminates the ideal candidate?
For example, a job may require a college degree, but its best workers would be those without one. Or an apartment complex is rude to applicants knowing there are an excess, scaring off good tenants in favor of those desperate. Or someone finds exceptional luck securing online dating “matches” and begins to fill their profile with requirements that put off worthwhile mates.
I think something like “market inefficiency” might be the word. Disclaimer—I’m not an economist and don’t know the precise technical meaning of this term. But roughly speaking, the situations you describe seem to be those where the law of supply and demand is somehow prevented from acting directly on the monetary price, so the non-monetary “price” is increased/decreased instead. In the case of the apartments, they’d probably be happy to increase the price until they’ve got exactly the right number of applicants but are kept from doing it by rent control or reputation or something, so they incur moral costs on the applicants. In case of hiring, they’re probably kept from lowering their wages through some combination of: inability to lower wages of the existing employees on the similar positions, wages not being exactly public anyway, and maybe some psychological expectations where nobody with required credentials will agree to work for less than X, no matter how good the conditions are (or alternatively they’re genuinely trying to pick the best and failing, than it’s Goodheart’s law). And in the case of the dating market there simply is no universal currency to begin with.
Conservation of thought, perhaps. The root problem is having more options than you can handle, probably amplified by bad premises. Or the other hand, if you’re swamped, when will you have time to improve your premises?
“Conservation of thought” is from an early issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction.
I think you are referring to Goodheart’s law, because all the measures your examples used as a proxy to achieve some goal were gamified in a way that the proxy stopped working reliably.
Hmm, this seems a little different from Goodhart’s law (or at least it’s a particular special case that deserves its own name).
This concept, as I understand it, is not about picking the wrong metric to optimize. It’s more like picking the wrong metric to satisfice, or putting the bar for satisficing in the wrong place.
I’m sure this phenomenon has a name by now, but I’m struggling to find it. What is it called when requirements are applied to an excess of applicants solely for the purpose of whittling them down to a manageable number, but doing so either filters no better than chance or actively eliminates the ideal candidate?
For example, a job may require a college degree, but its best workers would be those without one. Or an apartment complex is rude to applicants knowing there are an excess, scaring off good tenants in favor of those desperate. Or someone finds exceptional luck securing online dating “matches” and begins to fill their profile with requirements that put off worthwhile mates.
I think something like “market inefficiency” might be the word. Disclaimer—I’m not an economist and don’t know the precise technical meaning of this term. But roughly speaking, the situations you describe seem to be those where the law of supply and demand is somehow prevented from acting directly on the monetary price, so the non-monetary “price” is increased/decreased instead. In the case of the apartments, they’d probably be happy to increase the price until they’ve got exactly the right number of applicants but are kept from doing it by rent control or reputation or something, so they incur moral costs on the applicants. In case of hiring, they’re probably kept from lowering their wages through some combination of: inability to lower wages of the existing employees on the similar positions, wages not being exactly public anyway, and maybe some psychological expectations where nobody with required credentials will agree to work for less than X, no matter how good the conditions are (or alternatively they’re genuinely trying to pick the best and failing, than it’s Goodheart’s law). And in the case of the dating market there simply is no universal currency to begin with.
“throwing the baby out with the bathwater”?
Conservation of thought, perhaps. The root problem is having more options than you can handle, probably amplified by bad premises. Or the other hand, if you’re swamped, when will you have time to improve your premises?
“Conservation of thought” is from an early issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction.
I think you are referring to Goodheart’s law, because all the measures your examples used as a proxy to achieve some goal were gamified in a way that the proxy stopped working reliably.
Hmm, this seems a little different from Goodhart’s law (or at least it’s a particular special case that deserves its own name).
This concept, as I understand it, is not about picking the wrong metric to optimize. It’s more like picking the wrong metric to satisfice, or putting the bar for satisficing in the wrong place.