Goodhart’s Law and Why Measurement is Hard
David Manheim,
Ribbonfarm,
Sept 09, 2021
Stella Lee just linked to this article from a couple years ago on LinkedIn and I wanted to pass it along. Measurement is really tricky, and here's why: "Measurement replaces intuition, which is often fallible. It replaces trust, which is often misplaced. It finesses complexity, which is frequently irreducible." But despite this - or perhaps because of this - measurement does not answer all questions. This is especially clear in the case of complexity. Converting measures to metrics (i.e., subject to variables we can change) reduce dimensionality, obscure causal relationships, and sometimes even change the systems they are created to measure. These are all stones in the road of evidence-based policy, and are reasons why we should treat claims that something is 'evidence-based' with caution (note: I am not recommending we just go with intuition as an alternative).
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