Upstream

Data warns us of a problem we wouldn’t have seen otherwise—

pen of cancers, containing turtles, rabbits, and birds.21

One key factor is the prevalence of false positives: warnings that incorrectly signal trouble.

When everything is cause for alarm, nothing is cause for alarm.

Will the warning give us enough time to act effectively? (If not, why bother?) What rate of false positives can we expect?

The cost of missing those warning signals is simply too high.

we’d rather err on the side of too many false positives. The cost of missing those warning signals is simply too high.

with upstream efforts, success is not always self-evident.

we can’t apprehend success directly, and we are forced to rely on approximations—quicker, simpler measures that we hope will correlate with long-term success.

when measures become the mission. This is the most destructive form of ghost victory, because it’s possible to ace your measures while undermining your mission.

When people are rewarded for achieving a certain number, or punished for missing it, they will cheat.

remorse—even if it grossly violates the spirit of the mission—and they will find ways to look more favorably upon what’s illegal.

people will do anything that’s legal without the slightest remorse—even if it grossly violates the spirit of the mission—and they will find ways to look more favorably upon what’s illegal.

if you use a quantity-based measure, quality will often suffer.

What else might explain that success, other than our own efforts, and are we tracking those factors?

If someone wanted to succeed on these measures with the least effort possible, what would they do?

with complex systems, and as such, we should expect reactions and consequences beyond the immediate scope of our work.

The cobra effect occurs when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse.

A bounty on cobras was declared: Bring in a dead cobra, get some cash. “And he expected this would solve the problem,” said Vikas Mehrotra, a finance professor, on the Freakonomics podcast.25 “But the population in Delhi, at least some of it, responded by farming cobras.

the open space would encourage face-to-face collaboration, but it backfired.