Goodhart

Goodhart's insight says: once a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. People and algorithms optimise for the number rather than for what the number was meant to represent. Marketing is a textbook case: steer on clicks and you get clickable junk, steer on cost per lead and you get cheap worthless leads, steer on engagement and you get addictive tricks. AI accelerates this, because optimisation systems find the shortest route to the metric flawlessly. The defence: measure several things at once, keep targets and diagnostics separate, and periodically test against real commercial results.

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