| scottie said: I came in here expecting this to be about, metres, seconds and was planning to disagree. Hang on *formulates new opinion* If you replace 'useless' with a lesser term, 'less useful' then I agree. Australian guidelines for food are pretty strict, we require listing of the ingredients, as well as fat, sugar, carbs, salt and many other things in terms of % of total, and grams/serving of the food. About the only problem I have with the Australian system is that you can refer to additives/flavours by their number, not by the more common name (ie MSG) |
The idea is that, when you set up a certain set of superficial criterion that is used to measure anything, people will attempt to game it, undermining its effectiveness as a measure. What happened with food labelled (United States) is fat was made to be horrible by itself, and then they decide to replace fat with low complex carbs. Say calories are a problem, then they go low calorie with artificial flavoring that has suspect health effects.
In regards to something like "No Child Left Behind" in the United States, schools ended up gaming the system, to make tests useless. You can look at the job market to, where there ends up being an "arms race" where a set of "do this, do that" is set up, and then people superficially do it, and the system innoculates itself against these efforts.
One can also look into videogame systems, and how there ends up a belief that one feature or game is desired, so the competitors to the console makers will end up superficially adding it. Motion control, for example, isn't an end in itself, it is a means to something.
This goes on in a lot of areas, and I will admit the subject header is likely oversimplified, or over stated, and but can show end results of when a system is gamed.
