Goodhart's Law

Applied to Value capture ago
Applied to An even deeper atheism ago

Goodhart's Law states that when a proxy (or metric) for some value becomes the target of optimization pressure, the proxy will cease to be a good proxy.[1] One example of this might be a university that promotes researchers based on how many papers they publish. Researchers might start publishing seriously flawed papers in low-integrity publications (or cutting a single paper they were going to publish into three incomplete papers without a real reason besides the promotion incentive) in order to get the promotion. 

Further reading

Garrabrant, Scott (2017) Goodhart Taxonomy, LessWrong, December 30.

Wikipedia (2022) Goodhart's law, Wikipedia.

Related entries

Optimizer's curse | impact assessment

  1. ^

    Definition adapted from the LessWrong Concepts Portal

Applied to Issues with Futarchy ago
Created by Sharmake at