Metric Perversity and Bad Decision-Making

Note: Presentation times are in Pacific Standard Time (PST).

Wednesday, January 25, 2023 - 1:30 pm2:00 pm

Lea Kissner

Abstract: 

People keep making terrible decisions. Shockingly often, bad decisions are because of perverse metrics—metrics that are technically correct but drive people to bad decisions. This is an especially bad problem for security, privacy, abuse, and related fields: we have adversaries, we have unknowns, and we have many small risks with incredibly high impacts. In this talk, we'll go through the types of perverse metrics—and how to avoid them.

Lea Kissner[node:field-speakers-institution]

Lea was the CISO at Twitter and has done privacy, security, and abuse-fighting work at companies including consulting at Zoom, being the Global Lead of Privacy Technology at Google, and the CPO of Humu. They hold a Ph.D. in computer science (cryptography) from Carnegie Mellon.

BibTeX
@conference {286024,
author = {Lea Kissner},
title = {Metric Perversity and Bad {Decision-Making}},
year = {2023},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jan
}

Presentation Video