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.
Related entries
Optimizer’s curse | impact assessment
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Definition adapted from the LessWrong Concepts Portal.