Harvard Business Review: What Gets Measured AI Will Automate.
Harvard Business Review: What Gets Measured AI Will Automate. Goodhart's law on steroids. Paperclip maxing ourselves to death. Heaven help us.
Topic: goodhart law
29 chunks · 19 episodes
2.2x burst in 2025 Q4
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Peak quarter intensity across the topic's active span. Higher values mean attention was concentrated into a shorter stretch rather than spread evenly over time.
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- goodhart law appears in 29 chunks across 19 episodes, from 2025-03-24 to 2026-08-17.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 5/19/25 (2025-05-19), with 3 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with gradient, black box, and ben mathe, while by chunk count it sits between agent swarm and huge amount; its yearly rank moved from #20 in 2025 to #73 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
Cory Doctorow shared the story of a startup that is "Uber for Nursing."
Cory Doctorow shared the story of a startup that is "Uber for Nursing." The service buys the credit reports of nurses on the platform, and offers nurses who have debt a lower fee for completing jobs. This is gross–it's not about "how able is this person to pay back a debt to me" but about "what is t
LLMs are great at debunking… but also bunking.
LLMs are great at debunking… but also bunking. So if it has intimate knowledge of you and is not perfectly aligned (an impossibility) you get Goodhart's Law. An epic, society-scale monkey's paw. Hold on to your butts!
Goodhart's law is a form of 'cheating'.
Goodhart's law is a form of 'cheating'. Cheating happens with agents who aren't aligned with the collective as an end in and of itself. That means if there's an action that will get them as an individual an edge at the cost of the collective, they'll take it. You can get strong alignments by having
When you give a goal to a swarm, it creates a monkey paw situation due to Goodhart's law.
When you give a goal to a swarm, it creates a monkey paw situation due to Goodhart's law. The goal is a metric and a metric is the map not the territory. If you did it with aligned agents they'd do your intent not the letter where they disagree. But if it's a swarm of unaligned agents with you, if t
Goodhart's law is what leads to business models being misaligned with consumers in the limit.
Goodhart's law is what leads to business models being misaligned with consumers in the limit. Companies are a swarm of employees making interdependent decisions whose ground truth is the business model. Ultimately the ground truth about what a company cares about is the business model. Everything el
One way to mitigate Goodhart's Law: keep the actual objective secret.
One way to mitigate Goodhart's Law: keep the actual objective secret[mt]. Then, swap in an ever-changing set of proxy metrics. You could argue that good CEOs do this–explicitly or implicitly.[mu]
"Reward hacking" in models is just a specific example of Goodhart's law.
"Reward hacking" in models is just a specific example of Goodhart's law. If you get a result from a system that you can't understand (that is a black box to you), you can't check to see if it's found a deep real pattern, or something superficial. Apparently there was an example where a "tank detecto
An alternate frame of Goodhart's law: you can either steer the ship or understand the ship.
An alternate frame of Goodhart's law: you can either steer the ship or understand the ship.[tf][tg] The uncertainty principle applied to organizations. I heard this formulation from Ade Oshineye.