So… don’t optimize? Not even for longevity. But also don’t signal anti-optimization, or whatever the opposite of optimizing is. Don’t reward signalling, and don’t do any of the opposites of rewarding signalling.
I try to imagine such an entity ex nihilo, and I keep getting a novel experience that I’m going to call ‘paradigm error’. But when I try to apply those qualities to various organizations, there is simply a mismatch- and different organizations mismatch different things.
Don’t try to optimize anything, including meta to this description. Instead, try to do a good job of that thing. Including doing a good job at this meta-thing. My intuition says that doing a good job at avoiding Goodhart while doing a good job of doing a good job things is often going to mean using fuzzy metrics. I can’t describe what I actually mean by ‘fuzzy metrics’, but using fuzzy metrics to evaluate a thing is adjacent to, and not, having someone observe the thing and then rate how good they think it was on a scale (that method is a badly done hard metric). It might look like a narrative evaluation of an expert observer, but I think a core feature of what I’m calling a ‘fuzzy metric’ is there is no way to generate a fuzzy metric by following a written or unwritten formal procedure.
When checking to see if you’re doing a good job, look at some things that can be measured objectively, and combine those measurements with a thing that it is impossible for me to tell you how to get. Maybe “Don’t not go with your gut.” (double negative intended) might be a good job of explaining the non-measurement part of evaluation.
Such a full-stack organization can of course not optimize for maintaining an ideal culture, because that would be sacrificing literally all value. But they can try to do a good job of maintaining a good culture, identifying people who make the culture worse and humanely moving them to locations where they stop influencing the organizational culture.
In large organizations, hierarchy is impossible to avoid. I think a good tool to reduce that is to say that each level of hierarchy should have a unique object-level thing that they do, beyond bookkeeping or managerial tasks for the other levels. If in a corporate context, anyone who successfully replaces their own job with a few spreadsheet fomulae should not by default be punished for/with Redundancy.
What would such a full-stack organization do?
They couldn’t try to optimize for any thing.
So… don’t optimize? Not even for longevity. But also don’t signal anti-optimization, or whatever the opposite of optimizing is. Don’t reward signalling, and don’t do any of the opposites of rewarding signalling.
I try to imagine such an entity ex nihilo, and I keep getting a novel experience that I’m going to call ‘paradigm error’. But when I try to apply those qualities to various organizations, there is simply a mismatch- and different organizations mismatch different things.
Don’t try to optimize anything, including meta to this description. Instead, try to do a good job of that thing. Including doing a good job at this meta-thing. My intuition says that doing a good job at avoiding Goodhart while doing a good job of doing a good job things is often going to mean using fuzzy metrics. I can’t describe what I actually mean by ‘fuzzy metrics’, but using fuzzy metrics to evaluate a thing is adjacent to, and not, having someone observe the thing and then rate how good they think it was on a scale (that method is a badly done hard metric). It might look like a narrative evaluation of an expert observer, but I think a core feature of what I’m calling a ‘fuzzy metric’ is there is no way to generate a fuzzy metric by following a written or unwritten formal procedure.
When checking to see if you’re doing a good job, look at some things that can be measured objectively, and combine those measurements with a thing that it is impossible for me to tell you how to get. Maybe “Don’t not go with your gut.” (double negative intended) might be a good job of explaining the non-measurement part of evaluation.
Such a full-stack organization can of course not optimize for maintaining an ideal culture, because that would be sacrificing literally all value. But they can try to do a good job of maintaining a good culture, identifying people who make the culture worse and humanely moving them to locations where they stop influencing the organizational culture.
In large organizations, hierarchy is impossible to avoid. I think a good tool to reduce that is to say that each level of hierarchy should have a unique object-level thing that they do, beyond bookkeeping or managerial tasks for the other levels. If in a corporate context, anyone who successfully replaces their own job with a few spreadsheet fomulae should not by default be punished for/with Redundancy.