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Good­hart’s Law

TagLast edit: 5 Oct 2022 11:35 UTC by Lizka

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.

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Optimizer’s curse | impact assessment

  1. ^

    Definition adapted from the LessWrong Concepts Portal.

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