I read ‘unhealthy puzzle’ as a situation in which (without trying to redesign it) you are likely to fall into a pattern that hides the most useful information about your true progress. Situation where you seek confirmatory evidence of your success, but the measures are only proxy measures can often have this feature (relating to Goodhart’s law).
example: If I want to be a better communicator I might accidentally spend more time with those I can already communicate well. Thus I feel like I’m making progress “the percentage of time that I’m well understood has increased” but not actually have made any change to my communication skills.
example: If I want to teach well it would be easier to seem like I’m making progress if I do things that make it harder for the student to explicitly show their confusion—e.g. I might answer my own questions before the student has time to think about them, I might give lots of prompts to students on areas they should be able to answer, I might talk too much and not listen enough.
example: If I’m trying to research something I might focus on the areas the theory is already known to succeed.
All of this could be done without realising that you are accidentally optimising for fake-progress.
I read ‘unhealthy puzzle’ as a situation in which (without trying to redesign it) you are likely to fall into a pattern that hides the most useful information about your true progress. Situation where you seek confirmatory evidence of your success, but the measures are only proxy measures can often have this feature (relating to Goodhart’s law).
example: If I want to be a better communicator I might accidentally spend more time with those I can already communicate well. Thus I feel like I’m making progress “the percentage of time that I’m well understood has increased” but not actually have made any change to my communication skills.
example: If I want to teach well it would be easier to seem like I’m making progress if I do things that make it harder for the student to explicitly show their confusion—e.g. I might answer my own questions before the student has time to think about them, I might give lots of prompts to students on areas they should be able to answer, I might talk too much and not listen enough.
example: If I’m trying to research something I might focus on the areas the theory is already known to succeed.
All of this could be done without realising that you are accidentally optimising for fake-progress.