lexicon

what does this garbage even mean?

partly for more recent subscribers, and partly because a good glossary (like the one at the end of Vanilla Beer and Alenna Leonard’s book) is often a very useful starting point for any subject, here is a short list of concepts, running jokes and stock phrases which keep appearing in this substack …

Accountability Sink – from my own book, a management structure whereby responsibility for unpopular decisions is delegated to a system, allowing a manager to claim that they are unable to change the decision and are consequently not accountable for it.

Moral Crumple Zone – I wish I could remember who coined this; basically, an accountability sink which does something ghastly and is reformed or destroyed as a system, but which has performed its intended function of protecting another individual or system.

The Chickenshit Club -from the title of a book by Jesse Eisinger, this is the nickname given by James Comey to US Attorneys in the Southern District of New York with a 100% success rate in prosecuting white collar crime.  In general, public servants of any kind that are too risk-averse and never get criticised because they never do anything.

The Judge Over Your Shoulder – title of the Civil Service guide to understanding the process of judicial review and carrying out consultation exercises to avoid being vulnerable to it. But also, the state of mind of civil servants with an excessive fear of litigation.

Chicken efficiency – originally from a blog post by Mark Graham Brown, a performance metric for fast food managers which recorded how much meat they threw away.  The managers responded by only cooking-to-order for the last hour the shop was open, losing vast amounts of business but reporting 100% chicken efficiency.  Brought to my attention by Alex Harrowell as a vivid metaphor for any insane, partial or easily gameable metric.

All The Mixed-Race Dentists In Yorkshire – from my Cynic’s Guide to Fintech, descriptive of the tendency of machine learning systems to glom onto meaningless features of their training dataset.

Quantamental – I think this portmanteau of “quantitative” and “fundamental” was coined by Paul Marshall in his book “Ten and a Half Lessons From Experience”.  It refers to the use of data science to augment traditional stockpicking.  However, I tend to use it (based on my own jaundiced view of having seen this sort of thing done) to refer to “any use of quantitative techniques to support decisions already arrived at for other reasons, having the unattractive property of increasing your confidence in a conclusion without actually improving its accuracy”.

Head Of Research Portfolio – from “Songs My Portfolio Manager Taught Me”, this was the investment portfolio at Credit Suisse which consisted of the best ideas from the research department, with a ten per cent stop loss.  Notoriously, this portfolio had fantastic performance, while the “best ideas” portfolio without that discipline was a disaster.

Type 3 Error – from an old blog post about statistics.  A “type 1” error is, in the textbooks, a false positive, while a “type 2” is a false negative.  But the Type 3 error is, in my experience just as much of a problem – it refers to “a correct number which isn’t the one your boss wanted”.

Information Processing System of Last Resort – Ignorance.  I had thought Stafford Beer coined this joke but it was actually me.