r/IOPsychology • u/Necessary_Whole6163 • 7d ago

Discussion The Proxy Problem

https://zenodo.org/records/22101403

The Recursive Proxy Trap explains what I believe to be the proxy problem: when institutions replace direct evaluation of complex qualities with scalable proxies—credentials, rankings, tests, votes, reputation, or automated scores—the proxy can eventually become mistaken for the thing it was meant to measure.

The paper explores how this can create self-reinforcing selection systems that hide their own false negatives. Rejected candidates, ideas, or technical work may disappear before their actual quality can be observed, removing the very evidence that could reveal weaknesses in the filter.
It applies this framework across hiring, credential evaluation, online technical communities, academia, and AI evaluation, and proposes practical mechanisms for detecting and recovering information that proxy-based systems may otherwise discard.

The central idea is simple: a filter can erase its own mistakes from the dataset used to justify it.

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