Proxies, Measures & Gaming

Primes about the gap between a target and the proxy used to measure or optimize it: proxies that decouple from their targets under optimization pressure (Goodhart's, Campbell's, and Gresham's laws), construct validity and observability of the underlying state, and risks left unaddressed because ownership of the gap is diffuse.

8 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Campbell's Law — When consequential social decisions depend on a quantitative indicator, measured actors game it and distort the process the indicator was meant to monitor.
• Construct Validity — Whether a measurement procedure actually captures the theoretical construct it claims to, rather than a correlated but distinct surrogate, across a three-layer construct-proxy-signal gap.
• Goodhart's Law — When a proxy is placed under binding optimization pressure, its correlation with the construct it was meant to indicate collapses.
• Gresham's Law — Under enforced price parity over goods of differing quality, holders withdraw the better good and the worse good concentrates in the channel.
• Observability — Infer internal state externally.
• Proxy-Target Divergence — An apparatus calibrated against a proxy keeps operating on it after the proxy-target relationship has silently decoupled.
• Proxy–Target Fidelity — How faithfully an observable proxy tracks the unobservable target it stands in for — the degree to which acting on, optimizing, or inferring from the proxy is acting on the target itself.
• Unowned Known Risk — A hazard that is common knowledge yet reliably un-acted-upon because prevention costs are diffusely owned, horizons mismatch, precursors are normalised, and the outcome is later recast as a surprise.