Goodhart’s Law Rules the Modern World. Here Are Nine Examples

I used to dismiss Goodhart's law as trivializing measurement. After all in the oft mangled Deming Quote - what you cannot measure, you cannot manage or you cannot improve.

I was terribly wrong and this is my mea culpa.

Goodhart's can also be thought of as the notion of reflixivity or a negative feedback loop. Reliance on a measure leads everyone to optimize for it inducing fragility and in the limit breaking it.

This is often seen in realms where human behavior intersects with emergent phenomenon e.g. financial markets. A metric like the sharpe ratio comes into vogue. Everyone works on optimizing (gaming) it to the point that a high sharpe ratio actually becomes a signal of impending large drawdowns. (https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1002622066426773504).

The world is messy and we all labor under Godel Incompleteness.

The law is mentioned often on HN. But the question I never see discussed: what are the specific strategies to avoid it. I.e. what comes to mind is keeping the set of metrics, and then use a randomly chosen one each year for decision making/ranking, but I'm sure there are other approaches.