Temple Grandin has written about the importance of having a measure which is simple enough that it gets applied. Her example was whether cattle fall down—this tracks health, breeding, nutrition, and flooring (and possibly more—I don’t have the source handy). If there are too many features to keep track of or if the standards are vague, then people doing the work will ignore most or all of the measures.
Grandin suggests that her visual thinking is more apt to lead to usable standards than the more common non-autistic approach of thinking in words, but iirc, she doesn’t go further into what it takes to come up with good measures.
Thanks for mentioning Temple Grandin, I saw her TED speech and she is awesome.
There seems to be a tension here. Too complex and the metric doesn’t get applied, too simple and it gets abused. Of course in the case of cattle, there is no real manipulator, so no problems. But in case where there are conflicting incentives, this could pose a problem. Tax collection may be one such case. Too many criteria and they become inapplicable, too few and you have manipulation issues.
Temple Grandin has written about the importance of having a measure which is simple enough that it gets applied. Her example was whether cattle fall down—this tracks health, breeding, nutrition, and flooring (and possibly more—I don’t have the source handy). If there are too many features to keep track of or if the standards are vague, then people doing the work will ignore most or all of the measures.
Grandin suggests that her visual thinking is more apt to lead to usable standards than the more common non-autistic approach of thinking in words, but iirc, she doesn’t go further into what it takes to come up with good measures.
Thanks for mentioning Temple Grandin, I saw her TED speech and she is awesome.
There seems to be a tension here. Too complex and the metric doesn’t get applied, too simple and it gets abused. Of course in the case of cattle, there is no real manipulator, so no problems. But in case where there are conflicting incentives, this could pose a problem. Tax collection may be one such case. Too many criteria and they become inapplicable, too few and you have manipulation issues.
I think you get manipulation from the people who are supposed to put the regulations about cattle into effect.
I agree with your general point.