Introduced on day 16
Goodhart's law
When a measure becomes a target, optimizing it tends to break its link to the goal it was chosen to represent.
In detail
In ML work it appears as models, teams or reward models improving the reported number by cheap routes: biased low forecasts under MAPE, flagging nothing to keep precision high, tuning against the validation set. Defences are guardrail metrics that expose gaming, checks of the metric against cost, and rotating or auditing the target. Manheim and Garrabrant (2018) categorize several variants.