4 ms·

Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

• dragonwriter 9y ago
  That's only true to the extent that the chosen measure was only coincidentally something that looked like a good measure to start with; if you were actually measuring the true feature of merit, making it a target wouldn't make it a bad measure. Making a measure a target incentivizes discovery of its deficiencies, if any, as a measure.
  • pmichaud 9y ago
    I agree with you in the narrow sense, but I bet you can't think of a metric that should be hyper-focused on for any purpose. Even something like "Lives Saved" fails pretty hard if you do it hard enough.
  • eli 9y ago
    What's an example of a metric that measures the true merit of something?
    • Dylan16807 9y ago
      No metric is perfect, but if you were measuring fat percentage in a moderately-accurate way it would be a very solid basis for an incentive.