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Comment by davidmanheim | Hacker News Reader

This is probably where I should mention my two longer articles that discuss this in depth; https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/06/09/goodharts-law-and-why-... https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/09/29/soft-bias-of-underspec...

As well as my more recent paper categorizing the different ways it occurs; https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585

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Thanks for this great work-- I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff and enjoy reading other people's takes on how to deal with the impossibility of finding the One True Metric to rule them all.

To keep myself sharp looking out for the perverse incentives, I have to remind myself: don't be a slave to the metrics. We're data-informed, not data-driven. Data informs; people drive.

That was a much better take on Goodhart's Law than the Wikipedia article. It's easy to give up and say "Measurement is impossible!" but really we have to balance different factors and measurements are more dangerous at some times than at others.

Lots of content at ribbonfarm is very, very good ... highly recommended ...

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/11/05/ancient-rivers-of-mone...

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/03/02/fools-and-their-money-...

The Return of the Barbarian

Can Hydras eat unknown unknowns for lunch

The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial

Reducing a situation to a single measurement hides the dimensionality. I think intuition accounts for more kinds of measurement albeit less accurate or describable.

Since you’re here, what does the following property stand for in your second paper?

s ∈ AifM(s)/gec

Not OP but that should probably render as: s ∈ A if M(s) >= c

So: s (system state) is a member of A (permissible region) if M(s) (proxy measure of s since we can't directly observe it) is greater than or equal to c (threshold)

Great stuff. Say hi to Scott!

Are you both at MIRI now?

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