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> Goodhart's law . . . is certainly not a law A scientific law is a description of a common pattern. It's not a rule voted into being by the reality legislatur
by drewcoo 4y ago
> Goodhart's law . . . is certainly not a law
A scientific law is a description of a common pattern. It's not a rule voted into being by the reality legislature and enforced by nature beat cops.
Goodhart's certainly is a law.
> Goodhart's law (mis)applied to discussions of machine learning pipelines, so clearly there are glaring exceptions to the utility of metrics.
How can an alleged misapplication of Goodhart's law mean that metrics are not always useful? Goodhart's law itself says metrics aren't always useful.
- hgsgm 4y agoIt's not a scientific law. It's a meme law, broadly applicable but not always true. Scientific laws have no counterexamples, only refinements.
- drewcoo 4y agoGoodhart was an economist who stated his eponymous law in 1975, before Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (origin of "meme") was published in 1976. So Goodhart was not meme-ing. If you want to argue that economics isn't science or isn't hard science, fine. But law is used here in the sense of scientific law nevertheless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Economics_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Economics_laws