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Thinking

When a Metric Becomes a Target, It Stops Being a Good Metric

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Goodhart's Law: the moment people start optimizing for a number, they find ways to hit the number without achieving what it was meant to measure. A school that's judged by test scores will teach to the test. A company that tracks lines of code will get verbose programmers. The metric gets gamed; the goal gets lost. Always ask: are we measuring what matters, or just what's easy to count?

The point
Optimizing for a number often destroys the value it was meant to capture.

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