Metric: Difference between revisions

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 “we should ” as xxx remarked, “bevgrateful dolphins don't have opposable thumbs.”
-One could, and here I am indebted to  [https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/goodharts-law this] excellent resource on [[Goodhart’s law]], break the phenomenon down into four types.
+One could, and here I am indebted to  [https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/goodharts-law this] excellent resource on [[Goodhart’s law]], break the phenomenon down into four components.
+*'''Regressive''': using a single metric as a proxy to measure “[[multivariate]]” phenomena that are driven by several factors. Here [[Simpson’s paradox]] is not your friend. Much “[[social justice]]” — which we define as the wishful, if not wilful, tendency to boil complex socioeconomic phenomena down to simplistic moral propositions that even a dull fifth-former could understand, and only a dull fifth-former would fall for — stumbles into this trap.
-*'''Regressive''': using a single metric as a proxy to measure a phenomenon that is actually [[multivariate]] — caused by several factors. Here [[Simpson ’s paradox]] is not your friend.
+*'''Extremal''': Where a given metric is useful ''within a range'' — such a range generally corresponding to “normalcy”: “peacetime”, “normal operating conditions”, “[[business as usual]]” and similar platitudes — but which breaks down, fails, or even reverses itself in extremes or unusual cases beyond that range. Paging Messrs [[Black Scholes option pricing model|Black and Scholes]]. You know, using [[normal distribution]]s of independent events to model dependent events, like human behaviour of the market. These are especially fraught because the 80% of the time these metrics work, and they work fabulously, is exactly the range over which ''it doesn’t matter whether they work or not''. When things ''aren’t'' blowing up. The use case for the metric in the first place was
-*'''Extremal''': Where a the metric is a useful indicator under normal circumstances — [[Mediocristan]], but breaks down in extremes or unusual cases — [[Extremistan]]. Paging Messrs [[Black Scholes option pricing model|Black and Scholes]]. You know, using [[normal distribution]]s of independent events to model dependent events, like human behaviour of the market.
 *'''Causal''': the old [[correlation]] is not the same as [[causation]] chestnut.