Question · Seed idea · last reconsidered August 17, 2026
What happens when proxies become goals?
A question about what follows once a measure adopted to track a goal starts being optimized in its own right.
Open question — no answer required
- Territories
- Appearances
- Kind of question
- Diagnostic · Second-order
About the familiar drift where a proxy measure, adopted because the real goal was hard to observe directly, ends up being optimized instead of the goal it was meant to track.
Why it matters
A proxy is adopted because the real goal is hard to see and the proxy is easy to count. The substitution is honest at the start and nobody records the moment it stops being honest, because the number keeps improving either way.
Tensions
- The better a proxy is, the more confidently it is optimized, and the faster it decouples from what it stood for.
- Refusing to measure is not the alternative: an unmeasured goal is optimized too, just by whoever is loudest.
Positions taken
has response
- A measure that becomes a target stops measuringClaim
It is the question's most compact answer.
Questions this opens
questions
- When does optimization remove value?Question
Proxy capture is the most common single mechanism by which optimizing destroys the thing optimized for.
Questions in tension with it
challenges
- When does representation become sufficient?Question
If proxies replace goals, a representation that once was sufficient can quietly stop tracking what matters.
Connected ideas
questions
Explore this question in the map
Continue exploring
- QuestionWhen does representation become sufficient?A question about when a stand-in for reality is good enough to act on, and when it isn't.
- ClaimA measure that becomes a target stops measuringThe sentence usually attributed to Goodhart, in the form Strathern actually wrote it.
- ConceptProxyA measurable stand-in adopted to track a goal that is itself hard to observe directly.
- QuestionWhen does optimization remove value?A question about the point at which making something more efficient starts making it worse.