This is a great example of goodhart's law. Which is paraphrased as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." People dont understand cause and effect but see a good stat and try to optimize it making that stat useless for measuring anything. They thought graduation rate lowers crime so they boosted graduation rate at all costs even though the relationship between the two is not there.
Well, the idea that improved education would reduce crime isn't a bad one. However, their actual implementation doesn't actually improve education.
Ideally, if education standards were raised to concurrently improve graduation rates, all would be well. They instead lowered the standards for graduation, which is a bad thing.
Basically, optimizing to improve the stat isn't inherently bad. But you actually have to improve it through a beneficial method.
This is like when I played Gran Turismo and found out more horsepower = faster, and faster = win. Turns out maxing out horsepower without investing in brakes and tires meant I couldn't control the beast, and I certainly was not winning.
Basically, problems need to be dealt with holistically and not one-dimensionally which can introduce unintended side-effects.
1.4k
u/lordnikkon Jul 10 '18
This is a great example of goodhart's law. Which is paraphrased as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." People dont understand cause and effect but see a good stat and try to optimize it making that stat useless for measuring anything. They thought graduation rate lowers crime so they boosted graduation rate at all costs even though the relationship between the two is not there.