iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026

To 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.org

Goodhart's law - Wikipedia

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026

Goodhart'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

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/08/2026

But once Pagerank became the dominant means by which web users found pages, counting links stopped being useful: first, because people used Pagerank to find the best pages and link to them, making it impossible for new pages to get the inbound links needed to supersede incumbent pages. 25/

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