The Tyranny of Metrics¶
Muller, J. Z. (2018). The Tyranny of Metrics. Princeton University Press.
Cited by¶
5 citations across 5 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Evolutionary Trap
- Institutional and metric-driven systems — hospitals optimizing patient satisfaction at the expense of clinical outcomes, or rankings driven by inputs that once tracked quality but are now gameable.
This sourceCase studies (health care, education, policing) of institutions optimizing gameable proxy metrics — e.g. patient satisfaction or rankings — at the expense of the substantive outcomes the metrics once tracked.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
The blurb says metrics in medicine and education distort effort and can worsen outcomes, matching the general pattern, but it does not mention patient satisfaction or rankings.
“why surgical scorecards may increase deaths”
- Institutional and metric-driven systems — hospitals optimizing patient satisfaction at the expense of clinical outcomes, or rankings driven by inputs that once tracked quality but are now gameable.
Domain-specific¶
- Feature Factory
- That
target_measure_substitution/ Goodhart pattern recurs as genuine co-instances across domains that share no product-management machinery — school-test-score gaming, NHS and hospital waiting-time gaming, academic citation-counting, police arrest quotas, factory output-tonnage in command economies (the Soviet nail-factory archetype), social-media engagement optimisation, ML training-loss diverging from real capability, financial capital-ratio gamingThis sourceCase-by-case account of metric gaming across schooling, medicine, policing and academia.
- That
Mechanisms¶
- Leading Indicator Dashboard
- Its failure mode is that leading indicators are the most gameable signals on any board: because acting on them is rewarded, people optimize the indicator instead of the outcome
This sourceDescribes goal displacement in which people optimize the measured indicator rather than the underlying outcome.
- Its failure mode is that leading indicators are the most gameable signals on any board: because acting on them is rewarded, people optimize the indicator instead of the outcome
- Marginal ROI Dashboard
- Its failure mode is that a watched ratio invites gaming — once "marginal ROI" is the number that triggers scrutiny, teams optimize the number rather than the outcome, the classic form of Goodhart's law.
This sourceExplains how turning a performance measure into a target invites gaming and optimization of the number rather than the underlying outcome.
- Its failure mode is that a watched ratio invites gaming — once "marginal ROI" is the number that triggers scrutiny, teams optimize the number rather than the outcome, the classic form of Goodhart's law.
- Problem-First Intake Template
- A "success" field can also quietly become a place to record the metric that is easiest to measure rather than the outcome that matters — the McNamara fallacy in miniature, where the quantifiable crowds out the real
This sourceDescribes the McNamara fallacy as privileging what is quantifiable over outcomes that matter.
- A "success" field can also quietly become a place to record the metric that is easiest to measure rather than the outcome that matters — the McNamara fallacy in miniature, where the quantifiable crowds out the real
Verification¶
Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.
Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 1 of 5 citations: 1 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.
Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.
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Links previously used in the corpus¶
Before the registry existed this work was also linked 2 other ways.
- https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc7743t ×3
- https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174952/the-tyranny-of-metrics ×1
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