Vanity Metrics vs Meaningful Metrics
Discover the impact of vanity metrics versus meaningful metrics on decision-making and behavior change.
What was corrected
Article attributed the well-known pithy phrasing of Goodhart's Law ('when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure') directly to Charles Goodhart's own 1975 words, when that exact phrasing was actually coined by anthropologist Marilyn Strathern in a 1997 paraphrase of Goodhart's more technical original observation. It also stated that 'independent researchers estimated that 20 percent or more' of Twitter accounts were unverified or inactive around the 2022 Musk acquisition, framing this as an independent-researcher consensus, when in fact Twitter's own SEC filings claimed under 5 percent, and most independent studies found figures well below the stated 20 percent, with '20 percent or more' more closely matching Musk's own public claims rather than independent research consensus.
Goodhart passage rewritten to correctly distinguish his own technical 1975 observation from Strathern's later, more commonly quoted paraphrase. Twitter passage rewritten to accurately describe the real public dispute between Twitter's own low estimate and higher independent estimates, without misattributing a specific overstated figure to 'independent researchers' as a unified position.
Why this is better
Independent verification found this article was substantially cleaner than most others checked in this batch - 6 of 9 major claims (Jerry Muller/Tyranny of Metrics, Zynga's stock decline, Enron's revenue figures, MySpace's acquisition/sale prices, Kaplan & Norton's Balanced Scorecard research, and Donald Campbell's 1979 Campbell's Law) were all independently verified as fully accurate, and the illustrative 0.82/0.11 correlation figures were confirmed to be a clearly-marked hypothetical example rather than a citation to a real study.