Previously: Short Termism and Quotes from Moral Mazes

Epistemic Status: Long term

My list of quotes from moral mazes has a section of twenty devoted to short term thinking. It fits with, and gives internal gears and color to, my previous understanding of of the problem of short termism.

Much of what we think of as a Short Term vs. Long Term issue is actually an adversarial Goodhart’s Law problem, or a legibility vs. illegibility problem, at the object level, that then becomes a short vs. long term issue at higher levels. When a manager milks a plant (see quotes 72, 73, 78 and 79) they are not primarily trading long term assets for short term assets. Rather, they are trading unmeasured assets for measured assets (see 67 and 69).

This is why you can have companies like Amazon, Uber or Tesla get high valuations. They hit legible short-term metrics that represent long-term growth. A start-up gets rewarded for their own sort of legible short-term indicators of progress and success, and of the quality of team and therefore potential for future success. Whereas other companies, that are not based on growth, report huge pressure to hit profit numbers.

The overwhelming object level pressure towards legible short-term success, whatever that means in context, comes from being judged in the short term on one’s success, and having that judgment being more important than object-level long term success.

The easiest way for this to be true is not to care about object-level long term success. If you’re gone before the long term, and no one traces the long term back to you, why do you care what happens? That is exactly the situation the managers face in Moral Mazes (see 64, 65, 70, 71, 74 and 83, and for a non-manager very clean example see 77). In particular:

74. We’re judged on the short-term because everybody changes their jobs so frequently.

And:

64. The ideal situation, of course, is to end up in a position where one can fire one’s successors for one’s own previous mistakes.

Almost as good as having a designated scapegoat is to have already sold the company or found employment elsewhere, rendering your problems someone else’s problems.

The other way to not care is for the short-term evaluation of one’s success or failure to impact long-term success. If not hitting a short-term number gets you fired, or prevents your company from getting acceptable terms on financing or gets you...