Too Much Efficiency Makes Everything Worse: Overfitting and the Strong Version of Goodhart's Law
Jascha Sohl-Dicksteinsohl-dickstein.github.ioSaved by sari and
Too Much Efficiency Makes Everything Worse: Overfitting and the Strong Version of Goodhart's Law
Visakam Viraswamy (“Are You Serious?”) on playing the near-sighted game at the expense of the long-game:
"One of the stupidest things I’ve repeatedly seen smart people do – I call this Advanced Stupid – is that they get so fixated on trying to optimize something complicated, that they forget to optimize for survival, and then they get knocked out of
... See moreMaking systems resilient is fundamentally at odds with optimization, because optimizing a system means taking out any slack. A truly optimized, and thus efficient, system is only possible with near-perfect knowledge about the system, together with the ability to observe and implement a response. For a system to be reliable, on the other hand, there
... See moreMandy Brown • Against Optimization
The problem (or at least one of the problems) is that the twin edicts to simultaneously optimize your team and life and to be flexible in light of an uncertain future are in opposition to each other. Optimization presumes a kind of certainty about the circumstances one is optimizing for, but that certainty is, more often than not, illusory.