Goodhart's law is often misunderstood and the author here seems to agree and disagree. Goodhart's law is about alignment. That every measure is a proxy for the

Goodhart's law is often misunderstood and the author here seems to agree and disagree. Goodhart's law is about alignment. That every measure is a proxy for the thing you are actually after and that it doesn't perfectly align. Here's the thing, there's no fixing Goodhart's Law. You just can't measure anything directly, even measuring with a ruler is a proxy for a meter without infinite precision. This gets much harder as the environment changes under you and metrics' utility changes with time. That said, much of the advice is good: making it hard to hack and giving people flexibility. It's a bit obvious that flexibility is needed if you're interpreting Goodhart's as "every measure is a proxy", "no measure is perfectly aligned", or "every measure can be hacked"