Beyond PageRank, I feel this pattern has applicability in many areas of everyday life, especially those related to large organizations, such as employers judging potential employees by the name of the university they attended...
So a person who goes to a prestigious school and games the system in order to graduate [without actually getting smarter] is something of a “spam worker.” The OBP process is incentivizing earning a degree from a good school, and taking the emphasis off of getting smart.
I’d spent plenty of time thinking about SEO, and plenty of time thinking about people seeking prestige via academic institutions, but has never noticed the parallel.
...I have more written material on this subject, especially on possible methods of counteracting this effect...
I would be interested in hearing about those methods. I’m in the business of producing legitimate news (feel funny calling it “content”), and am unhappy with the amount of time I must spend making sure my website stays out of the false negative space.
Also, I wonder if the methods you have thought of would also apply to these parallel situations in society.
I really like the concept of a ‘spam worker’. That would make interview panels into ‘spam worker filters’. :)
Since this article has done well, I will probably write down my thoughts on mitigation for a future article, but if you can’t wait, the last section in the linked WebSci paper has most of the written text on mitigation I have. Unfortunately I don’t have any advice for dealing with it as a content author, only from a system-wide perspective. Given the feedback here and new material I have explored since, there will probably be significant differences between that and the article here, but the core will probably remain in some form.
The methods I have in mind (namely, discarding singletons such as Google and working on distributing the logic and focusing on local rather than global judgments) can probably be applied to real-world institutions and governments, but I haven’t spent nearly as much time thinking about this as I have the online counterparts, so there is still work to be done there.
Seconded. The concept generalizes nicely. We should start identifying more cases of “generalized spam” in our lives, i.e. cases where people optimize their measure by some imperfect proxy in precisely the way that the proxy deviates from the true measure of quality.
Discussion topic: Is sucking up to your boss a form of (generalized) spam? Or is it the kind that’s sufficiently advanced to be “content” (i.e. it deviates from the true measure in such a way that it’s nevertheless informative)?
Wouldn’t it depend on what the boss is in business for? Here’s a wild thought: If the boss wants a successful business to raise his status and self-confidence, an employee sucking up would just cut out the middle goal, and it would be the honest employee that is missing the true goal by helping to make the business successful. Just a thought..
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.
Yessss—let me guess your not a specialist in HR are you? Google have a complex and reruitment and testing pocess but they have found that people that score worse are actualy better employees.
I realy wish techies woudl not persist in blindly applying simplistic anologies to complex real world suituations.
for recruitment its not quite the same its a lot harder to go to oxford or cambridge than a former polly—universities also provide networks and other advatages—hence the number of ex bullingdon club members in the current UK govenment.
What your describing is the “selecting people like me” bias that occurs in recruitment—which is also eveident in Googles bias for peope like them from stamford.
Thanks Alexandros, this was well articulated.
So a person who goes to a prestigious school and games the system in order to graduate [without actually getting smarter] is something of a “spam worker.” The OBP process is incentivizing earning a degree from a good school, and taking the emphasis off of getting smart.
I’d spent plenty of time thinking about SEO, and plenty of time thinking about people seeking prestige via academic institutions, but has never noticed the parallel.
I would be interested in hearing about those methods. I’m in the business of producing legitimate news (feel funny calling it “content”), and am unhappy with the amount of time I must spend making sure my website stays out of the false negative space.
Also, I wonder if the methods you have thought of would also apply to these parallel situations in society.
I really like the concept of a ‘spam worker’. That would make interview panels into ‘spam worker filters’. :)
Since this article has done well, I will probably write down my thoughts on mitigation for a future article, but if you can’t wait, the last section in the linked WebSci paper has most of the written text on mitigation I have. Unfortunately I don’t have any advice for dealing with it as a content author, only from a system-wide perspective. Given the feedback here and new material I have explored since, there will probably be significant differences between that and the article here, but the core will probably remain in some form.
The methods I have in mind (namely, discarding singletons such as Google and working on distributing the logic and focusing on local rather than global judgments) can probably be applied to real-world institutions and governments, but I haven’t spent nearly as much time thinking about this as I have the online counterparts, so there is still work to be done there.
Seconded. The concept generalizes nicely. We should start identifying more cases of “generalized spam” in our lives, i.e. cases where people optimize their measure by some imperfect proxy in precisely the way that the proxy deviates from the true measure of quality.
Discussion topic: Is sucking up to your boss a form of (generalized) spam? Or is it the kind that’s sufficiently advanced to be “content” (i.e. it deviates from the true measure in such a way that it’s nevertheless informative)?
Wouldn’t it depend on what the boss is in business for? Here’s a wild thought: If the boss wants a successful business to raise his status and self-confidence, an employee sucking up would just cut out the middle goal, and it would be the honest employee that is missing the true goal by helping to make the business successful. Just a thought..
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)
Yessss—let me guess your not a specialist in HR are you? Google have a complex and reruitment and testing pocess but they have found that people that score worse are actualy better employees.
That would be one strange socing system. Do you have any references on that?
I realy wish techies woudl not persist in blindly applying simplistic anologies to complex real world suituations.
for recruitment its not quite the same its a lot harder to go to oxford or cambridge than a former polly—universities also provide networks and other advatages—hence the number of ex bullingdon club members in the current UK govenment.
What your describing is the “selecting people like me” bias that occurs in recruitment—which is also eveident in Googles bias for peope like them from stamford.