It very much is a cousin of the broken window fallacy.

Bastiat's original point of the Parable of the Broken Window could be summed up by the aphorism "not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts". It's a caution to society to avoid relying too much on metrics, and to realize that sometimes positive metrics obscure actual negative outcomes in society.

It's very similar to the practice of startups funded by the same VC to all buy each others' products, regardless of whether they need them or not. At the end of the day, it's still the same pool of money, it has largely come around, little true economic value has been created: but large amounts of revenue has been booked, and this revenue can be used to attract other unsuspecting investors who look only at the metrics.

Or to the childcare paradox and the "Two Income Trap" identified by Elizabeth Warren. Start with a society of 1-income families, where one parent stays home to raise the kids and the other works. Now the other parent goes back to work. They now need childcare to look after the kids, and often a cleaner, gardener, meals out, etc. to manage the housework, very frequently taking up the whole income of the second parent. GDP has gone up tremendously through this arrangement: you add the second parent's salary to the national income, and then you also the cost of childcare, housework, gardening, all of those formerly-unpaid tasks that are now taxable transactions. But the net real result is that the kids are raised by someone other than their parents, and the household stuff is put away in places that the parents probably would not have chosen themselves.

Regardless, society does look at the metrics, and usually weights them heavier than qualitative outcomes they represent, sometimes resulting in absurdly non-optimal situations.

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trinsic2 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Very thought out reply on the nuances around this. Thanks for generating insight on this topic.

I think our society is being broken by focusing too much on metrics.

Also the idea of breaking windows to generate more income reminds me of the kind of services we have in modern society. It's like many of the larger encomic players focus on "things be broke", or "Breaking Things" to drive income which defeats the purpose of having a healthy economic society.

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chairmansteve 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

"I think our society is being broken by focusing too much on metrics".

Maybe we should start with a set of principles?

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mallowdram 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

These are mistaken arguments. The automation of imagination is not imagination. Efficiency at this stage is total entropy. The point of AI is to make anything seemingly specific and render it arbitrary to the point of pure generalization (which is generic). Remember that images only appear to be specific, that's their illusion that CS took for granted. There appears to be links between images in the absent, but that is an illusion too. There is no total, virtual camera. We need human action-syntax to make the arbitrary (what eventually renders AI infantile, entropic) seem chaotic (imagination). These chasms can never be gapped in AI. These are the limits.

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trinsic2 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Efficiency at this stage is total entropy.

Im not sure I understand your point, or how your point is different from the parent?

Edit: I see you updated the post, I read through the comment thread of this topic and Im still at a loss on how this is related to my reply to the parent. I might be missing context.

	▲	mallowdram 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		There is no benefit to AI, not one bit, the barrier to entry grows steeper, rather than is accessed. These are not "hobbies" but robotic copies. This is demented btw, this take: >>Who knows, maybe one day I’ll hit a goldmine idea and commit some real money to it and get a real artist to help! CS never examines the initial conditions to entry, it takes short-cuts around the initial conditions and treats imagination as a fait accompli of automation. It's an achilles heel. edit: none of these arguments are valid, focusing on metrics, the broken window problem. These are downstream of AI's mistaken bypassing of initial conditions. Consider the idea of automating arbitrary units as failed technology, and then examining all of the conditions downstream of AI. AI was never a solution, but a cheap/expensive (its paradox) bypassing of the initial conditions. It makes automation appear to be a hobby. A factory of widgets that mirages as creativity. That is AMAZING as it is sequestered in the initial arbitrariness of language! How did engineering schools since the 1950s not notice, understand, investigate the base units of information; whether they had any relationship direct or otherwise to thought, creativity, imagination? That's the crux.

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Chris2048 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> the "Two Income Trap" identified by Elizabeth Warren

This is addressed here: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/05/06/the-two-inco...

childcare is not usually a lifelong cost, so the advantage of working anyway is to develop a career that persists after children no longer need a full-time parent. And incomes usually go up over the course of a career, so if the income matches those costs when the parent goes to work, that is likely to change.

> the net real result is that the kids are raised by someone other than their parents

this is the genuine argument for staying home, but to counterpoint that, it still traps the homemaker with less work experience as a result, meaning they are potentially worse off in case of a divorce, though maybe that's an extension of the "welfare" argument i.e. divorce settlements.