Overpowered Metrics Eat Underspecified Goals

This does not mean you devolve into chaos. The study of most complex systems shows that disparate goals can lead to harmony despite conflict; alignment in the absence of clearly imposed goals, organizational or systemic, is clearly possible. For example, capitalism, at its best, uses competition to harnesses the desires of individual

As I noted in my post on metrics, “Building systems using bad metrics doesn’t stop their self-optimization, they just optimize towards something you didn’t want.” Underspecified goals interact with this process in an interesting way.