the fisherman of halicarnassus

the moment a metric becomes the goal, people stop improving the thing and start improving the number.

tell a school that test scores matter and eventually people teach for the test.

tell a company that call time matters and suddenly customer problems get “solved” faster without actually being solved.

tell social media creators that engagement matters and eventually everyone is screaming, rage baiting, and posting whatever keeps you from scrolling.

that is goodhart’s law in practice.

numbers are useful right up until people realize their lives depend on making the numbers look good.

then the measurement slowly stops measuring what you actually cared about in the first place.

the idea that tiny differences in initial conditions can lead to massive and unpredictable changes later on.

if you are interested in the subject, i highly recommend james gleick’s chaos, especially the chapter on universality.

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