The Goodhart's Law of Child Abuse
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by Blender Dumbass
Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".
Charles Goodhart once correctly observed: ↩ Reply
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
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Which translated to the regular English sounds like this: ↩ Reply
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
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The law, called "Goodhart's Law" is an observed phenomenon in a field of statistics, which has consequences in the real life. Have you even asked yourself why AI is so terrible? Why corporations are so bad-shit-crazy? Why the education system is failing us? Well all of those things are examples of the Goodhart's Law in action. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. ↩ Reply
I already told this story multiple times in my articles, but when I was in school something happened that made me question why am I there to begin with. On a lesson about trigonometry I had an audacity to ask the teacher to explain a formula. I don't remember what it was exactly. I do remember that it had a SIN function. And we were instructed to simply use the calculator to calculate it, and just simply memorize the formula. ↩ Reply
When he heard me demanding to know how this whole thing works ( I wanted to gain an intuitive understanding of it ), he freaked out and told me something along the lines of: ↩ Reply
It's not my job to make you learn. My job is to make you pass the test.
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If you take Goodhart's Law into consideration, suddenly it makes sense. How do you know if a teacher is any good? Well you see how well the teacher teaches. How do you know how well he teaches? Well you test the students in some way. And if they score is high on the tests, they know stuff, and therefor the teacher is great. We have a measure. The grade. Yet automatically this measure becomes the target. Now for a teacher to stay working, he needs to make the class pass a certain threshold of excellence on the test. And so now the task is no longer to teach the class, but make the class be able to pass the test specifically. ↩ Reply
Recently I read an article by Cory Doctorow on the matter and it inspired me to make this article. I think I know one more place the Goodhart's Law is showing it's symptoms without us wanting to do anything about it. Child Abuse! ↩ Reply
What are the goals when it comes to fighting Child Abuse? Stopping rapists? Ending violence in the family? Maybe trying to avoid traumatic experiences? ↩ Reply
Children are humans and all humans should have their human rights. A person who rapes you takes your freedom away. A person who shares your naked pictures online takes your privacy away. So to fight Child Abuse, we have to fight for children's independence. We have to fight for child freedom. With good base of freedom there will not be rape. With good privacy laws nobody will share naked pictures of you. The problem is, people are too simple-minded and too scared to think deeply about anything. So what we are fighting against is not the lack of freedom, but rather the symptoms themselves. The rapists, the violence, and if you are lucky, maybe there will be an attempt to help you avoid trauma. ↩ Reply
On the surface that makes sense, those are the measures that we can use to understand the levels of Child Abuse in any system of governance. Using those metrics we can compare countries, states, counties and towns to one another. Mathematically, to some extent it makes some sense. We've got a measure. Yet now this measure becomes a target, which makes it cease to be a good measure. ↩ Reply
I know multiple people ( myself included ) that were victims of child abuse, real actual trauma inducing child abuse, but not one that comes from the regular boogieman, rather those that come from the systems in place, designed to stop the boogieman. When your target is to stop men over 18 dating women under 18, you will abuse those women, put them in concretion camps, and brainwash them with horror stories and other forms of torture to make them unable to even meet those men that are over 18 in the first place. ↩ Reply
You think I'm exaggerating? I'm not. In my country this is a serious problem and yet, because all this child abuse is happening seemingly "for a good cause" nobody wants to think about it as something bad. How could you? ↩ Reply
From what I learned from the work by Lenore Skenazy this is not happening just in my country. Kids are abused, for a "good cause", out of their rights everywhere. The UK just passed a law making it illegal not to abuse children's privacy rights. Hell that law abuses everybody's privacy rights. Australia does the same. ↩ Reply
There are people that fight it. EFF is challenging the courts. Wikipedia is trying to do something ( but it seems like they are failing ). Soon to be a good parent, you will have to break the law. Soon if you want your child to not be abused, you will have to go to war. ↩ Reply
Happy Hacking!!! ↩ Reply
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Troler
c:0Goodhart's Law can be easily abused. Once you know the metric, use mental gymnastics to find a technical solution without meeting the criteria.
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