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Pica

TagLast edit: 12 Dec 2023 14:29 UTC by Fluffnutt

Pica is the name of an eating disorder where people eat non-nutritional items. An example is people with iron deficiency eating ice cubes; there is no iron in ice cubes, but iron and crunchiness sort of go together. By analogy, pica is also when people are missing something, and respond by doing something which doesn’t provide it, or doesn’t provide much of it, like watching sitcoms because they’re lonely or playing Minecraft because they feel unproductive.

AllAmericanBreakfast suggests that pica is like Goodhart’s Law, with the added failure that the metric being maximized isn’t even clearly related to the problem you’re trying to solve, giving two examples:

Related Pages: Akrasia, Goodhart’s Law

Ex­pe­ri­en­tial Pica

Alicorn16 Aug 2009 21:23 UTC
126 points
113 comments3 min readLW link

No­body does the thing that they are sup­pos­edly doing

Kaj_Sotala23 Sep 2017 10:40 UTC
60 points
6 comments2 min readLW link
(kajsotala.fi)

Ra­tion­al­ist Lent

Qiaochu_Yuan13 Feb 2018 23:55 UTC
40 points
62 comments1 min readLW link

Bug Hunt 2

alkjash20 Feb 2018 5:00 UTC
33 points
15 comments3 min readLW link
(radimentary.wordpress.com)

Silence

alkjash18 Mar 2018 4:10 UTC
58 points
17 comments4 min readLW link
(radimentary.wordpress.com)