{"id":23779,"date":"2015-02-21T01:00:10","date_gmt":"2015-02-21T06:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=23779"},"modified":"2015-02-14T13:43:14","modified_gmt":"2015-02-14T18:43:14","slug":"qotd-campbells-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/02\/21\/qotd-campbells-law\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Campbell&#8217;s Law"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The most common problem is that all these new systems \u2014 metrics, algo\u00adrithms, automated decisionmaking processes \u2014 result in humans gaming the system in rational but often unpredictable ways. Sociologist Donald T. Campbell noted this dynamic back in the \u201970s, when he articulated what\u2019s come to be known as Campbell\u2019s law: \u201cThe more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthe more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>On a managerial level, once the quants come into an industry and disrupt it, they often don\u2019t know when to stop. They tend not to have decades of institutional knowledge about the field in which they have found themselves. And once they\u2019re empowered, quants tend to create systems that favor something pretty close to cheating. As soon as managers pick a numerical metric as a way to measure whether they\u2019re achieving their desired outcome, everybody starts maximizing that metric rather than doing the rest of their job \u2014 just as Campbell\u2019s law predicts.<\/p>\n<p>Felix Salmon, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/business\/2014\/01\/quants-dont-know-everything\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Why Quants Don&#8217;t Know Everything&#8221;, <em>Wired<\/em><\/a>, 2014-01-14<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The most common problem is that all these new systems \u2014 metrics, algo\u00adrithms, automated decisionmaking processes \u2014 result in humans gaming the system in rational but often unpredictable ways. Sociologist Donald T. Campbell noted this dynamic back in the \u201970s, when he articulated what\u2019s come to be known as Campbell\u2019s law: \u201cThe more any quantitative [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,41],"tags":[261,42,290],"class_list":["post-23779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-quotations","tag-management","tag-sociology","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6bx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23779"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23780,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23779\/revisions\/23780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}