I’ve often wondered whether many problems in the world are not variations of attempting “exact optimization” — this being the only way to guarantee success in a winner-take-all reward system.

In engineering at least, when any kind of iteratively converging algorithm is run, the prototypical behavior is a fast convergence to a neighborhood of the solution, and then a really long process of getting to the exact one. In choosing exact optimization, a practically “good enough” solution is rejected in favor of expending a huge amount of resources to obtain the last 1% of the gap to optimality.

Where there is no bound to performance, a winner-take-all competition encourages ever-higher performance, driving progress. In reality, there is no system without some constraint that imposes a bound. We hope that rational allocation decisions will cause us to collectively halt at an approximate solution and move on to something else. However, this requires cooperative strategies. Winner-take-all is not stable for cooperative strategies, so we end up collectively committing resources disproportional to the amount of improvement we get in any observable metric. With the exception of the lone winner in each competition, everybody else suffers massive misallocation.

There are a number of absurd problems that arise from not developing a reward system consistent with a “soft” metric that gives some value to anything but the top rank.

More here.

You may keep getting

Enter your WordPress.com API key to link this blog to your WordPress.com account. Be sure to use your own API key! Using any other key will lock you out of your stats.

even if the API key is correct. or if you hard code the API key

An API Key is present in the source code but it did not work.

The WordPress.com Stats Plugin is not working because it needs to be linked to a
WordPress.com account.

I didn’t find a solution in any of the forums, so I looked at the stupid script some more. Basically it uses the API key to get a “blog_id” (database index, most likely) from WordPress.com and can’t find one. So I made up a blog_id in the code. That shut up the plug-in, but of course stats aren’t tracked.

Finally, I went to http://dashboard.wordpress.com, logged into the account, made a new garbage *.Wordpress.com blog, then a bit later took out the made-up blog_id from the code, de-activated and re-activated, and … everything works. The external blog shows in the “Global dashboard.” Also the real blog_id is returned from code. But, if I take out the hard coded API key, it stops working again.

This is definitely a WordPress.com problem with registering externally hosted blogs, so to make it work, hard code the API key, make sure there is at least one *.Wordpress.com blog, wait a little bit, then re-activate the stats plug in.