Overpowered Metrics Eat Underspecified Goals

Similarly, outside capital comes with the goal of maximizing returns — not fulfilling the vision. Dan Schmidt wrote about this in the context of the show, Silicon Valley : The vision of a cloud-based machine learning tool that uses their amazing compression algorithm turns into “the box,” because pressure from the outs

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.