Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law) When you optimize for, say, the number of publications, you encourage aspiring professors to vomit out more minimal publishable units and self-promote more loudly rather than thinking interesting thoughts and writing them down after some rumination. The property you actually care about, the interestingness and quality of the research, is a latent property. You cannot optimize for it by optimizing any of its indicators; they are only noisily related, and intervening on the indicators will only break the connection between the indicator and the latent interestingness.