Comment by hammock

Comment by hammock 2 days ago

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> There is a general problem with rewarding people for the volume of stuff they create, rather than the quality. If you incentivize researchers to publish papers, individuals will find ways to game the system,

I heard someone say something similar about the “homeless industrial complex” on a podcast recently. I think it was San Francisco that pays NGOs funds for homeless aid based on how many homeless people they serve. So the incentive is to keep as many homeless around as possible, for as long as possible.

djeastm 2 days ago

I don't really buy it. Are we to believe they go out of their way to keep people homeless? Does the same logic apply to doctors keeping people sick?

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alfalfasprout 2 days ago

It's a metric attribution problem. The real metric should be reduction in homeless, for example (though even that can be gamed through bussing them out, etc-- tactics that unfortunately other cities have adopted). But attributing that to a single NGO is tough.

Ditto for views, etc. Really what you care about as eg; youtube is conversions for the products that are advertised. Not impressions. But there's an attribution problem there.

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  • wizzwizz4 2 days ago

    Define the metric as "people helped": then bussing them out to abandon them somewhere else isn't a solution, because the adjudicators can go "yes, you made the number go down, but you did so by decoupling the metric from what it was supposed to measure, so we're not rewarding you for it".

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    • SOLAR_FIELDS 2 days ago

      My spouse works in the homelessness field and the correct metric to follow is number of homeless given housing. It’s the “housing first” approach. Harder to game counting amount of people directly placed into homes - someone is paying rent and maintaining a trackable occupied space that you can verify that the client is actually utilizing - and this approach cannot be gamed by “bus them somewhere else”

      What many people don’t realize is just how many normal life hurdles are significantly easier to overcome with a stable housing environment, even if the client is willing and available to work. Employment, for example, has several precursors that you need. Often you need an address. You need an ID. For that you need a birth certificate. To get the birth certificate you need to have the resources and know how to contact the correct agency. All of these things are much harder to achieve without a stable housing environment for the client.

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      • wizzwizz4 a day ago

        "Number of homeless given housing" is only the correct measure due to the nature of the domain-specific problem. I'm wary of this strategy in general, because the people responsible for deciding how things are accounted for are rarely experts enough to identify sensible domain-specific metrics, so they'll have to consult experts. But that creates a vulnerable point of significant interest to would-be grifters, and if they're not experts enough to assess expert consensus, you end up with metrics that don't work, baked in.

        But yes, if we're only looking at homelessness, "how many formerly-homeless people have been given housing?" is a very good way to measure successful interventions.

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    • xhkkffbf 2 days ago

      And then some will wander back closing the loop and preserving jobs.

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watwut 2 days ago

Yeah, it is totally NGO that creates homelessness /s

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