Clearly, the solution is to judge society by how many currently-un-gamed benchmarks it has produced.
Goodhart's Law Comes for Every Benchmark You Trust
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Re: Goodhart's Law Comes for Every Benchmark You Trust
#12I think Goodhart's law is just a consequence of correlation vs causation. It is very easy to find a metric that is correlated with what you want. But once you start trying to influence a system, you quickly push it out of the range where the correlation holds. In order to optimize for something, you need to maximize the actual causative variable. This is much harder.
That is correct. It's just that in most cases in the real world, there is a complex casual network, and many of those variables are not even measurable. So you have to pick a proxy for one or more of the variables and make a metric out of this.
The other problem is that in the real world, we want to make decisions, and the easiest way to make decisions is to have a single metric to judge everything by. With multiple metrics, you get into these debates about subjectivity.
You can get around Goodhart's law if you are able to pick multiple proxy variables and demand that the user optimize them all. And you pick these variables in a way that it's really hard to cheat (i.e. deoptimize the actual intended variable while optimizing the proxy variables). Game designers do this all the time for example, because the system is clean and simple enough to do it.
Re: Goodhart's Law Comes for Every Benchmark You Trust
#13Not forecasting though. You can't goodhart predicting real-world events
Re: Goodhart's Law Comes for Every Benchmark You Trust
#14Had to stop reading when the article devolved into Claude spam. "defensible in isolation," "honestly ranked," ugh. Please write your own blog post.
Re: Goodhart's Law Comes for Every Benchmark You Trust
#15[dead]
Re: Goodhart's Law Comes for Every Benchmark You Trust
#16Had to stop reading when the article devolved into Claude spam. "defensible in isolation," "honestly ranked," ugh. Please write your own blog post.
My strategy these days is to scan and look for the tells and click out when I see them. Mine was the same "honestly ranked, with no silver bullets on offer". I suspect in less than a year we won't be able to tell the difference.
Re: Goodhart's Law Comes for Every Benchmark You Trust
#17Had to stop reading when the article devolved into Claude spam. "defensible in isolation," "honestly ranked," ugh. Please write your own blog post.
My strategy these days is to scan and look for the tells and click out when I see them. Mine was the same "honestly ranked, with no silver bullets on offer". I suspect in less than a year we won't be able to tell the difference.
In a year or more, the audience will likely be an agent instead of a person. It'll be interesting to see how that shifts language and article formats.
Re: Goodhart's Law Comes for Every Benchmark You Trust
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
My strategy these days is to scan and look for the tells and click out when I see them. Mine was the same "honestly ranked, with no silver bullets on offer". I suspect in less than a year we won't be able to tell the difference.
In a year or more, the audience will likely be an agent instead of a person. It'll be interesting to see how that shifts language and article formats.
It already is. AI bots overflowing visitor logs now with endless IPs
Re: Goodhart's Law Comes for Every Benchmark You Trust
#19Had to stop reading when the article devolved into Claude spam. "defensible in isolation," "honestly ranked," ugh. Please write your own blog post.
My strategy these days is to scan and look for the tells and click out when I see them. Mine was the same "honestly ranked, with no silver bullets on offer". I suspect in less than a year we won't be able to tell the difference.
lol
reminds me of a Claude math paper:
"honestly sharp , no hype: cos(pi+pi)+2+2=cos(2pi)+4=1+4=5"
Re: Goodhart's Law Comes for Every Benchmark You Trust
#20Had to stop reading when the article devolved into Claude spam. "defensible in isolation," "honestly ranked," ugh. Please write your own blog post.
Yeah, the most obvious giveaway is to ask yourself, "is this how a human would actually write?"