Followup to: Is Google Paperclipping the Web? The Perils of Optimization by Proxy in Social Systems

tl;dr: In this installment, we look at methods of avoiding the problems related to optimization by proxy. Many potential solutions cluster around two broad categories: Better Measures, and Human Discretion. Distribution of decisions to the local level is a solution that seems more promising and is examined in more depth.

In the previous article I had promised that if there was a good reception, I would post a follow-up article to discuss ways of getting around the problem. That article made it to the front page, so here are my thoughts on how to circumvent Optimization by Proxy (OBP). Given that the previous article was belabored over at least a year and a half, this one will be decidedly less solid, more like a structured brainstorm in which you are invited to participate.

In the comments of the previous article I was pointed to The Importance of Goodhart's Law, a great article, which includes a section on mitigation. Examining those solutions in the context of OBP seems like a good skeleton to build on.

The first solution class is 'Hansonian Cynicism'. In combination with awareness of the pattern, pointing out that various processes (such as organizations) are not actually optimizing around their stated goal, but some proxy, creates cognitive dissonance for the thinking person. This sounds more like a motivation to find a solution than a solution itself. At best, knowing what goes wrong, you can use the process in a way that is informed by its weaknesses. Handling with care may mitigate some symptoms, but it doesn't make the problems go away.

The second solution class mentioned is 'Better Measures'. That is indeed what is usually attempted. The 'purist' approach to this is to work hard on finding a computable definition of the target quality. I cannot exclude the possibility of cases where this is feasible no immediate examples come to mind. The proxies that I have in mind are deeply human (quality, relevance, long-term growth) and boil down to figuring out what is 'good', thus, computing them is no small matter. Coherent Extrapolated Volition is the extreme end of this approach, boiling a few oceans in the process, certainly not immediately applicable.

A pragmatic approach to Better Measures is to simply monitor better, making the proxy more complex and therefore harder to manipulate. Discussion with Chronos in the comments of the original article was along those lines. By integrating user activity trails, Google makes it harder to game the search engine. I would imagine that if they integrated those logs with Google Analytics and Google Accounts, they would significantly raise the bar for gaming the system, at the expense of user privacy. Of course by removing most amateur and white/gray-hat SEOs from the pool, and given the financial incentives that exist, they would make it significantly more lucrative to game the system, and therefore the serious black hat SEOs that can resort to botnets, phishing and networks of hacked sites would end up being the only games in town. But I digress. Enriching the proxy with more and more parameters is a pragmatic solution that should work in the short term as a part of the arms race against manipulators, but does not look like a general or permanent solution from where I'm standing.