Yeah, that’s the kind of thing I was getting at: perhaps feeding him uninformative sucking-up is deviating from the business success metric but still giving him what he wants—just like the android suggesting a shady Mexican pharmacy to me violates my “desired message” measure, but the spammer has gone to such great lengths to get that message to me that I’m still better off, on net, for getting the spam since the android friend more than makes up for it.
Another (disturbing) example, from back in the old days, would be if the French and British were fighting and the British offer mercenaries a reward for each French head they bring back. Then some French general gets this idea to disrupt the British system with “false negatives” (dead Frenchman but no corresponding head recovered), and does this by incinerating all French forts so that the bodies can’t be recovered.
(Or, alternatively, the French general disrupts the British reward programme with false positives by blowing the entire military budget on fake severed French heads to trade in for the reward, leaving them entirely undefended while they try to collect.)
Do the British really care that the number of heads collected doesn’t truly measure the number of French killed? Nope!
This is an curious pattern that is arising here.. In the case of the employee sucking up, (I’m not sure if this goes for the english vs. french examples) what’s going on is that the ‘spammer’ is actually the one who identified the true target quality, and it’s the honest employee that plays by the rule that’s optimizing by proxy. In fact, the boss probably sees what’s going on (on some level), but plays along with the spammer as he is actually getting satisfied.
I don’t think ‘reverse optimization by proxy’ is a good name for it, but it’s the best I can come up with. In fact, you could probably port that to a lot of situations where ‘playing by the rules’ (aka. aiming for the stated target) will leave you worse off than critically judging a situation, reading through the rules, integrating context and inferring the real goal in a given situation...
you could probably port that to a lot of situations where ‘playing by the rules’ (aka. aiming for the stated target) will leave you worse off than critically judging a situation, reading through the rules, integrating context and inferring the real goal in a given situation...
PUA vs. women’s stated preferences in men, I’m looking in your general direction here.
Yeah, that’s the kind of thing I was getting at: perhaps feeding him uninformative sucking-up is deviating from the business success metric but still giving him what he wants—just like the android suggesting a shady Mexican pharmacy to me violates my “desired message” measure, but the spammer has gone to such great lengths to get that message to me that I’m still better off, on net, for getting the spam since the android friend more than makes up for it.
Another (disturbing) example, from back in the old days, would be if the French and British were fighting and the British offer mercenaries a reward for each French head they bring back. Then some French general gets this idea to disrupt the British system with “false negatives” (dead Frenchman but no corresponding head recovered), and does this by incinerating all French forts so that the bodies can’t be recovered.
(Or, alternatively, the French general disrupts the British reward programme with false positives by blowing the entire military budget on fake severed French heads to trade in for the reward, leaving them entirely undefended while they try to collect.)
Do the British really care that the number of heads collected doesn’t truly measure the number of French killed? Nope!
This is an curious pattern that is arising here.. In the case of the employee sucking up, (I’m not sure if this goes for the english vs. french examples) what’s going on is that the ‘spammer’ is actually the one who identified the true target quality, and it’s the honest employee that plays by the rule that’s optimizing by proxy. In fact, the boss probably sees what’s going on (on some level), but plays along with the spammer as he is actually getting satisfied.
I don’t think ‘reverse optimization by proxy’ is a good name for it, but it’s the best I can come up with. In fact, you could probably port that to a lot of situations where ‘playing by the rules’ (aka. aiming for the stated target) will leave you worse off than critically judging a situation, reading through the rules, integrating context and inferring the real goal in a given situation...
PUA vs. women’s stated preferences in men, I’m looking in your general direction here.
(PUA = pick-up artist strategies)