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Comment by formercoder | Hacker News Reader

When a metric becomes a target

They used the wrong metric, but an easy one to measure. The right metrics (are the factories producing things correctly? Are those making it to consumers? Are the consumers paying for them?) are too difficult to measure discretely. And so we end up here.

Reminds me of "the 'return 200' health-check endpoint is working; how can the site be down?"

And THIS is why crypto markets are dropping, because China is flooding the network with miners to meet energy quotas

IMO mining costs are dominated by chips, nobody has idle data centers on standby for such an occasion.

Just because a cost ain't a large share of the pie doesn't mean it ain't worth shaving anyway.

You need to look up China mining operations. They pop up “data centers” anywhere there is free or cheap electricity. Sounds like a perfect operation for factories that must use electricity

Aren't all metrics targets?

I think what he is trying to say is that the metrics were meant be a check, a measure of knowing, for whether we are going to meet our vision/target.

Just yesterday, at our dev team at a trading firm, we went through our OKR review for the quarter. The metrics were the target yesterday. It was all about clicking those check boxes and not about delivering the bigger picture.

No, they are supposed to measure progress in one dimension towards a target. They are often misused, but it’s not necessary to conflate the improper use case with the original intent.

Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

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