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Re:Heart surgeons refuse difficult operations to avoid poor ... by smsm42 on Saturday April 21, 2018 @04:03PM (#16893126)
Goodhart law deals with proxies - i.e. measures not of direct target, which is hard to measure, but of something that is easy to measure, and you consider it related to the actual target. If you need wins and measure wins, wins are not a proxy and thus Goodhart law does not apply. But if, say, it were hard for you to count wins in soccer for some reason, and you measured time spent with the ball per player instead, thinking that if players own the ball all the time, they surely going to win eventually - you'd get a team that is engaged in pointless passing around instead of actually scoring goals.

For surgeons, the direct target is for the patient to get better - or at least live longer and with higher quality of life. Proxy is the measure of a mortality of a specific surgeon. It is not a direct target - as the surgeon can achieve zero mortality by not doing any surgery at all, but his patients would die of suffer from the lack of treatment.

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