{"id":3982,"date":"2010-05-14T08:55:29","date_gmt":"2010-05-14T13:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=3982"},"modified":"2010-05-14T16:22:42","modified_gmt":"2010-05-14T21:22:42","slug":"the-fires-this-time-joe-flood-on-managing-new-york-city-ambinder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2010\/05\/14\/the-fires-this-time-joe-flood-on-managing-new-york-city-ambinder\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fires This Time–Joe Flood on Managing New York City (Ambinder)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sobering thoughts for us techno-geeks.<\/p>\n

On 13 May 2010, Marc Ambinder (The Atlantic) wrote The Fires This Time–Joe Flood on Managing New York City”<\/a>, interviewing Joe Flood on NYC’s 1970’s fetish on efficiency and “how its overreliance on smart guys and computer formulas turned out be a disaster, especially when it came to the withdrawal of fire protection from poorer neighborhoods” with an abundance of fires.<\/p>\n

One of the big appeals of using numbers to understand complex problems is getting counterintuitive results, which by definition go against common sense. After all, why spend all the time and money on a study that will only tell you what you already suspected? (…) Those are the kind of results the city hired RAND to produce, and that’s what they got.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Quoting Bill James in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball,<\/p>\n

“Any new metric should tell you 80% what you already knew, and 20% what you didn’t. Less than 20% and it’s not very useful, more than 20% and there’s probably something wrong with the numbers.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps Governor Deval Patrick and the Massachusetts supporters of subsides for casinos should read Joe Flood’s forthcoming book, The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City-and Determined the Future of Cities<\/a>.<\/p>\n

-RichardH<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sobering thoughts for us techno-geeks. On 13 May 2010, Marc Ambinder (The Atlantic) wrote The Fires This Time–Joe Flood on Managing New York City”, interviewing Joe Flood on NYC’s 1970’s fetish on efficiency and “how its overreliance on smart guys and computer formulas turned out be a disaster, especially when it came to the withdrawal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[167],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3982","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-richardhsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3982"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3990,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3982\/revisions\/3990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}