It goes “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” How does that work in practice?
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Here is one of my favorite examples: in the early days of covid, while everybody was trying to figure out what to do with public spaces, schools, etc., one school found out that the official definition of “close contact” (for whoever was running their show at the time) was “within 6 feet of someone for 15 minutes.”
Their solution to avoiding close contact in the classroom was to make all the children change seats every 12 minutes. Thus, no close contact at all, though of course it would only make viral transmission worse.
This is the heart of Godhart’s law: you see a problem, make up a rule or metric to try to address it, and very often the target audience will find a way to follow the rule or optimize the metric in a way that doesn’t solve or even worsens the original problem.
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