Question · Seed idea · last reconsidered August 17, 2026
When does optimization remove value?
A question about the point at which making something more efficient starts making it worse.
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- Diagnostic · Engineering
About optimization targets that, once maximized, turn out to have been standing in for something the optimization itself degrades.
Why it matters
Optimization requires an objective, and every objective is narrower than the situation it was written for. What falls outside is not weighed against the gain, because it was never in the objective to begin with — it is simply gone, and the metric reports an improvement.
Tensions
- The value being removed is usually the one nobody knew how to write into the objective.
- Not optimizing is also a choice with costs, and they land on different people than the costs of optimizing.
Positions taken
related to
- A measure that becomes a target stops measuringClaim
Optimizing a proxy is how optimization removes the value it was aimed at.
Questions this opens
questions
- Which constraints contain experience?Question
A constraint that looks like pure inefficiency is the usual hiding place for a value the objective never captured.
Connected ideas
questions
is questioned by
- What happens when proxies become goals?Question
Proxy capture is the most common single mechanism by which optimizing destroys the thing optimized for.
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Continue exploring
- ConceptAbstractionA simplifying layer that hides detail in order to make something easier to use or reason about.
- QuestionWhat 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.
- QuestionWhich constraints contain experience?A question about which limits, once removed, take accumulated know-how down with them.
- ClaimA measure that becomes a target stops measuringThe sentence usually attributed to Goodhart, in the form Strathern actually wrote it.