Comment by niccl
5 years ago
This makes me think of something that's intrigued me for a while: what's the productivity of a yacht racer? The better they are, the less time they spend actually racing in competitions.
Doesn't this mean that by your professor's metric they are becoming less productive?
I would say that a yacht racer, or other athlete's, "output" is their wins/ranking in competitions. There are devils in the details of how you assign a simple number to that, and Goodhart's law is always lying in wait, but that seems to be the right kind of thing to measure.
More cynically, you could measure a racer by the amount of revenue generated by sponsorships, ad placement on the yacht hull, endorsement fees/kickbacks, etc.. If you have two equally competitive racers, but one is more mediagenic, perhaps that one has higher "productivity"? If a racer often loses, but does so in engaging, nailbiting ways that create a following, perhaps that one is "productive"? A wrestling "heel" may lose their bouts but be a successful character, say.
> There are devils in the details of how you assign a simple number to that, and Goodhart's law is always lying in wait
Yup, they could start sabotaging their competition or bribing judges to disqualify other competitors, etc.
You would be interested in Sabermetrics, which is the use of statistics to quantify the contribution of baseball players to the outcomes of the games they play in. Yacht racing is also a competitive team activity and you could define the productivity of a racer in terms of how much that person's efforts contributed to the position or time their yacht finished a race in. It's a relative measure and would have to be defined relative to other racers or to a fictive 'standard' racer.
For something high risk like that it might be you only “produced” something if you placed.