Bartweiss

> in both cases someone could accidentally optimize the test

I think this is what I disagree with.

The water heater story is about a viable-for-market design which also optimized for the test. The equivalent for a car emissions test might be optimizing the transmission to reduce emissions at the specific speeds which will be tested. Those speeds could be sweet spots of the engine curve by accident, or they could be planned that way. I don't think that's necessarily right, but it's within the bounds of "natural" design for the product.

Instead of doing that, VW submitted something for testing which was fundamentally different from what went to market. Rather than being misleading, the test results were fundamentally irrelevant. Creating two completely different modes of behavior isn't something you could do by chance, and it means there's no real limit on how badly they could cheat.

This is omnipresent even where regulators aren't involved: every graphics card benchmark out there is 'manipulated' relative to real world performance. At this point it's so universal that I don't think anyone is even fighting it - as long as everyone games benchmarks roughly the same amount, the relative scores stay usable.

Your point about fairness and passive design is the one that makes me view these cases differently also. In the anecdote, the product being tested was the same one being sold, and there's no sign the heater was worsened to improve test performance. The designers just picked the best-scoring option among some reasonable configurations. (Frankly, once they noticed that issue, what were they supposed to do? Pick the worst-scoring, or pick the spec out of a hat?)

In the VW story, the test-bench vehicle was fundamentally different from the market vehicle, and the road version was designed to behave worse on the metrics to get other gains. I happen to know someone who bought a diesel Jetta specifically because it was more eco-friendly than other options, and I think he'd draw a clear line between tuning for test metrics and VW consciously lying to their buyers.

I do think that manipulating a purely instructive measure is less extreme than manipulating a compliance test; consumers can seek alternate tests and reviews, but the state emissions test has special status even if a dozen other tests give a different result. That said, I believe Energy Star ratings affect tax rebates and electric bills, and they're required to be printed on products - so that's not really an arbitrary test.

There are other differences here too, I think. The water heater trick is passive manipulation that stays in place at all times, which limits how far from "real" performance it can get. And per the story, it seems more like "teaching to the test" than "cheating". That is, Volkswagen consciously moved away from the mandate outside of testing. The water heater was (potentially) as energy-efficient as they could design, with the test score manipulated on top of that.

None of that makes it harmless - if "as good as you can make" doesn't hit standards without manipulating them, that's still a problem. But I do find it less galling than "intentionally worsens emissions outside the test bench".

Crash test dummies have basically this problem also. They're designed for realism in certain very narrow ways, and then the very small number of approved dummies are used for testing car safety.

The industry has made a bit of progress, surprisingly unprompted by regulations - female and child dummies came into circulation before they were required in tests. But overall, testing is still run against a tiny handful of body types which move 'realistically' in only a few regulation-guided respects.

Citing Maven also feels a bit circular. It's an important Java application, but being a build tool it's only because there's lots of Java out there to build.

Minecraft and a lot of the other apps are terminally impressive, so it's easier to justify the ecosystem that produced them.

Wait, which countries are we referencing outside of those three?

Thailand looks straightforwardly exponential so far and has fairly heavy mask use, agreed. But Singapore, Taiwan, and arguably Malaysia seem too early to call: they're still plausibly on either of a European curve or South Korea's ramp-then-flatline.

Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, and Burma all seem to be below the line for meaningful data. And Hong Kong isn't broken out. So I guess my questions are: do Indonesia and the Philipines have "mask cultures" to a level comparable to South Korea and Japan, and are their testing regimes wide enough to rely on those curves?

I don't know the answer to that. And I agree that the "masks work" graph/meme circulating is questionable. But unless I'm missing something/somewhere, this data just looks like "too soon to call"?

> you had to be logged in to the web interface already with another account

Obviously I don't know specifics, but if this applies to any router which has multiple tiers of login then it could be a pretty serious problem. I suspect that might be true for routers designed specifically broadcast multiple networks (e.g. school or shared apartment-building routers)?

Good point.

The TARP bailout in 2008 involved buying a ton of stock from troubled companies, but it was sold back to them as soon as they could buy the money back. And this will be the second bailout for a bunch of airlines.

So one of the most interesting ideas I've heard is that we shouldn't nationalize things by fiat, but when TARP-style bailouts happen, the government should just keep the stock, at least for a while. If it really was a one-off crisis, the shares are a good investment. But if it's a failing business, or one paying dividends and then looking for handouts, it's not just a money sink.

There's also a fairly good argument for this in the line of trains and highways. Planes aren't physically trapped on one course, but pretty much every nation heavily regulates who can fly where, when. Airports are often state-controlled, and even private ones need state approval to add new runways or flights.

What we have now is one of the ridiculous "private non-market" arrangements. When airlines in Europe fly empty planes to stop the government from taking their flight slots away, that's not the fault of the companies, but it's also not a functional market we should expect efficiencies from.

I'm not a fan of "regulate markets into dysfunction then nationalize them", but if the fundamental restraints on travel are too severe to let the market function freely, privatization stops making much sense.

The third option is "because they don't want to be blamed for model error". Governments aren't necessarily competent, but you can try to get them to understand 5%/95% confidence intervals, at least in hindsight. If you publicly release a prediction, and then the real outcome is the 10% confidence line, you're probably going to be yelled at for being wrong regardless of the error bars.

Of course, if the center of the prediction is horrifying, "people don't understand confidence intervals" then becomes a case of avoiding societal breakdown.

It's been fascinating to see the rise, fall, and rise of digital watches among techies.

I remember 1990s Dilbert having an entire storyline about the engineers getting into a calculator-watch arms-race. In real life, it was pretty common to laugh about how a $50 digital Casio could do far more things than a Rolex.

By about 2010 (or perhaps even by the iPod Touch or Palm Pilot), I stopped hearing that. Watches had lost all of their unique functions to smartphones, so their raison d'etre was either "rugged and cheap" or "jewelry" and calculator watches almost vanished.

Circa 2015, we get Pebble gen 2, Apple Watch, and Fitbit Blaze: smart watches have phone integrations, fitness tracking, and don't look like hell anymore. Since then, they've increasingly aimed for design good enough to wear with a suit; the Galaxy Watch is always-on and analog.

These days, I see two splits among watch-wearing engineers: smartwatch vs not, and practical vs decorative. So the result is quadrants like:

Fitbit | Galaxy Watch

Casio | Longines

> The CEO will be under tremendous pressure if he/she tries to optimize for a 1 year timeframe (for example) as opposed to quarter-by-quarter.

Its bizarre to talk to well-meaning execs (even below C-suite) at public companies and hear them overtly say this. "Well we know X and Y are sound investments for the company's success, but it's a question of finding a way to sell something that long-term without tanking our stock price."

I try not to cry market inefficiency without good evidence, but "shareholders promote good corporate governance" starts feeling pretty bizarre when the people running a company describe shareholders like corporate raiders encouraging them to destroy value for a quick payout.

> I wish boards can come up with a compensation structure for execs which optimizes for long term.

For all the talk about "when founders should get out of the way" and "what makes a good founder doesn't always make a good CEO", it's interesting to see that research still finds companies with founder-CEOs performing substantially better. Higher share prices (which might stem from overconfidence), but also better long-term financials, more R&D spending, more influential patent filings, etc.

And that doesn't necessarily mean founders are super-geniuses, exceptional managers, or even unusually attuned to their market. They get less of their salaries in cash, hold options and stocks longer, and vary their behavior less in response to compensation structure. (Also, they often hold so much stock they can't sell in full without panicking the market.)

So it really does look like we just haven't found a good way to compensate non-founder CEOs: their behavior is extremely responsive to their compensation, but nobody has found a scheme that makes them act long-term to the degree a founder would.

For any business with decent size, absolutely. There are a thousand ways to claw back options, and the reason they don't get used is that doing it even once would make hiring practically impossible.

For a small enough company? It falls in the same category as "diluting out of one guy's shares" - bad morals and bad business, but it still happens.

Not only is an easily discovered public event poor leverage, it becomes much worse leverage if it comes up in an interview.

When companies (or governments) try to manipulate employees, they frequently rely on some kind of willful ignorance. Wells Fargo is a great example: they set impossible performance targets and turned a blind eye to fraud, then fired and blacklisted whistleblowers - ostensibly for knowing about that same fraud!

If a shady employer wants leverage, even public events can suffice as long as they can claim ignorance. For example, most stock option grants are immediately lost if you're fired, but even at-will employment can't be terminated specifically to deprive someone of their options. So an employer might give a generous options package, then "discover" the IG video and use it for dismissal at just the right time to prevent a profitable exercise. But if that video comes up during hiring, it's no longer a plausible reason for later dismissal, at least without committing perjury regarding the interview.

I can't even work out a scenario where "lots of people know about this including us" is an effective way to manipulate someone.