Goodhart’s Law

TagLast edit: Oct 5, 2022, 11:35 AM 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.

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^
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Good­hart’s Law

Further reading

Related entries

Really rad­i­cal empathy

Value capture

Types of speci­fi­ca­tion prob­lems in forecasting

The Nat­u­ral State is Goodhart