relevant article in the New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_page?currentPage=all

Getting back to trying to propose practical mitigation strategies for goodhart's law, I propose a fairly simple solution: Choose a G*, evaluate performance based on it, but KEEP IT SECRET. This of course wouldn't really work for national scale, GDP-esque kind of situations, but for corporate management situations it seems like it could work well enough. If only upper management knows what G* is, it becomes impossible to optimize for it, and everyone has to just keep working under the assumption they're being evaluated on G.

Taking it a step further, to hedge against employees eventually figuring out G* and surreptitiously optimizing for it, you could have a bounty on guessing G* - the first employee who figures out what the mystery metric G* really is gets a prize, and as soon as it's claimed, you switch to using G**

At work a large part of my job involves choosing G* , and I can report that Goodhart's Law is very powerful and readily observable.
Further : rational players in the workspace know full-well that management desire G, and the G* is not well-correlated with G, but nonethelss if they are rewarded on G*, then that's what they will focus on.

The best solution - in my experience - is mentioned in the post: the balanced scorecard. Define several measures G1* G2* G3* and G4* that are normally correlated with G. The correlation is then more persistent : if all four measures improve it is likely that G will improve.

G1* G2* G3* G4* may be presented as simulaneous measures, or if setting four measures in one go is too confusing for people trying to prioritise (the frwer the measures the more powerful) they can be sequential. IE If you hope to improve G over 2 years, then measure G1* for two quarters, then switch the measurement to G2* for the next two and so on. (obviously you don't tell people in advance). NB this approach can eb effective, but will make you very unpopular.

Of course, just like with Military Training, the Firefighters may have biases about what they consider to be rational.

For instance, most would probably save the injured baby at the expense of an uninjured adult or child. Yet, the baby has less immediate worth than the adult or small child, as these latter two are conscious and self-aware in a way that the baby is not.

Yet, almost instinctively, humans tend to go for the baby. Of course, genetics has wired us to be that way.

Are these sorts of ethical dilemmas ever posed to people serving in the Military?

I often wonder about this, because there seems to be no shortage, in times of real crisis, to find a soldier willing to fling himself under the trolley (without needing to hurl a fat man) if need be.

Of course, this is something that is ingrained in the soldier's behavior during training, and it, at times, doesn't take.

Then, there are times when the military becomes filled with people who are willing to throw anyone onto that railroad track, as long as the math turns out correctly (more people saved than killed). It is an officer's job to do just that (and then order a soldier to do the actual throwing).

I guess this just shows that people are capable of having their normal morality either amplified or nullified depending upon the context. In some cases, there may be no morality to speak of in some classes of soldiers.

However, you do bring up an excellent point. Immediacy of the situation/decision. It is relatively easy for people to make dispassionate and rational decisions when they are not in the heat of the moment or more removed from the actual situation. I have found that it is a rare individual who can actually make a rational decision in the heat of the moment without considerable training (and not just mental training. It takes real simulation of the act for most people to learn just how they will react in such situations).

I think the thing that made it seem like a draft is the missing "I went" at the beginning of the article. I also noticed illustrate is misspelled, at a quick glance.

I thought most people chose not to push the fat man because there is no conceivably realistic way that a fat man could stop a train, even one as small as a trolley. Although the thought experiment tells us the fat man will stop the train, our knowledge of trains tells us that nothing stops trains. When I envision this scenario, I can't help but (realistically) imagine the trolly hitting the fat man, then continuing on and running over the five others.

See also: Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans)

You are really going to take a concept worked out in dozens of academic papers and declare it meaningless because you have trouble figuring out how to apply it in one particular context?

Was this intended to be published? It seems unedited. Save in "Drafts" instead of "Less Wrong" to unpublish.