Unfortunately not true. It is not a single metric.

we have extra rules on top: No doping, separation of genders,...

> Not really. It depends on the quality of the measure and any underlying assumptions. If the target is knowing who is the fastest then a simple stopwatch (measure) is 100% aligned with the target. So the measure becoming the target is completely fine.

I get your point but with this case the measure is the target, so at no point does the "measurement become the target", it's aligned from the start. But then again, this is only true if your measure is of people performing the task you actually care about. If you want to know the fastest person and you measure over 100m you may end up with Bolt, which is great if you need "the fastest over 100m in a sprinting setup" but not if you need the fastest over a full marathon.

In general, it's an extremely good first approximation - many measures result in poor targets, and care needs to be taken when turning a measure into a target. Even then it usually becomes a worse measure.

> The faulty assumption here was that the only way to hand in a rat's tail is by killing them.

More than that, it's an assumption that an increase in rat tails equals a decrease in live rats. Even if you kill a rat to get a rat tail, that doesn't necessarily hold true. It rewards those that breed 5 rats, release 4 and hand in the tail of 1. Killed rats would have still been a bad target. The true target was fewer live rats. Dead rats can be a reasonable measure, but as a target it has very risky outcomes.

>Not really. It depends on the quality of the measure and any underlying assumptions. If the target is knowing who is the fastest then a simple stopwatch (measure) is 100% aligned with the target. So the measure becoming the target is completely fine.

I am thinking of how runners all lean forward just before the finish line. This must slow their overall speed but gets a part of their body to the measurement datum slightly quicker.

I admit its not a huge deviation between the measurement and the target but still it is an attempt to affect the measurement by means other than running fastest

I shouldn't be surprised given what website I'm on, but it's crazy that people will litigate the finer points of replacing human judgement of human arts rather than reject the premise outright.

That gets you people doing weird tricks to game the starting block and the finish line, which are artificial distractions from "fast running".

Only accepting entire rat bodies wouldn't necessarily work either; see the "cobra effect" that supposedly happened in colonial India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

I think you mean “best shoe”