By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026Leek proposes that these are all expressions of the same underlying phenomenon, a failure mode of data science that takes a world of "granular personal data" and arrives at a world where "personalisation produc[es] more sameness." 22/ 1581
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026To these excellent examples, I'd add another one, from the world of monetary policy: Goodhart's Law, which holds that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure": en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhar... 23/en.wikipedia.orgGoodhart's law - Wikipedia 1947
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026Goodhart's Law describes many phenomena. When Google first deployed Pagerank, they showed that how counting the inbound links to all the pages on the web let you extract a signal about which pages were most important (because there was no reason to link to a page unless you found it noteworthy). 24 1472
