Over at Strong Mind we have a weekly newsletter, usually written by me or Hazel.
As a good chunk of my writing and creative output goes into our Thought of the Week, I thought I should share one here. This one is about ‘Goodhart’s Law’:
I recently came across Goodhart’s Law, which neatly captures some of our thoughts on goal setting. It states: “When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good measure.”
The idea comes from economics, but it has all sorts of applications:
- if we measure education only by test scores, schools will ‘teach to the test’ and the education we really value will decline;
- if we measure policing only by crime rates, police may be incentivised to underreport or declassify crimes;
- if governments aim to meet carbon emission reduction targets, they might outsource heavy-polluting industries to other countries instead of reducing emissions at the source.
There are obvious applications in climbing too. If we measure progress only by climbing grades, we’ll end up sticking to climbs that suit our style or seek out ‘soft’ grades, rather than working weaknesses and prioritising learning. Or we’ll cut corners to maximise the grade instead of our actual progress. We might do the same in training, and measure progress by how much weight we can hang on the fingerboard with, or how many pull-ups we can do, rather than improving our climbing.
The problem that Goodhart’s Law highlights is that metrics naturally simplify complex things. Grades are an attempt to describe climbing difficulty, but they don’t describe all of a climbing experience and I’m sure they don’t describe your unique conception of what makes climbing challenging, fulfilling or worthwhile.
We can avoid the pitfall of Goodhart’s Law by keeping diverse metrics of progress and being aware of unhelpful or misaligned incentives. But most importantly, we need to keep in mind our true goal. The chances are, chasing numbers isn’t your real passion in climbing. I’d bet you didn’t get into climbing to climb a certain grade, and you’re probably not training just to complete a certain number of reps.
Whatever your reason for climbing (or doing anything for that matter) I think it’s well worth keeping that reason in mind, however complex it is, rather than reducing the goal down to a few letters and numbers. To be honest, I think metrics are really useful because keeping track of progress allows us to gauge learning and understand how effective our efforts are. But a little more focus on what we’re doing and why, rather than results and metrics, would keep our values, intentions and goals a little more aligned.
What do you think? When have measures become goals for you? How do you stay focused on your real goals? Do you trust your processes enough to let go of metrics?
Angus Kille 