'Jj inspo to write: "Focusing generatively vs pattern exhaustion - distilling essential practices & creating shared background. LISP journals such & another [posing as lost document, but fibbingly as so]"

Goodhart's Law is shorthand in cybernetic systems for this notion of encountering drawbacks from capturing the sense of something too completely…

1975, Charles Goodhart's original formulation, in "Problems of Monetary Management: The U.K. Experience":

"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."

1996, Keith Hoskins:

"'Goodhart's Law' – That every measure which becomes a target becomes a bad measure – is inexorable, if ruefully, becoming recognized as one of the overriding laws of our times."

1997, Merilyn Strathern published "Improving ratings':

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

Has the language been tightened up, ready for the history books? It's economical. If David Deutsch consulted Strunk & White, maybe he'd call it.