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It‘s Goodhart‘s law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"


I’d interperet the cease qualifier in goodhart’s law to require the measure to be good in the first place, but I think SLOC is a negative indicator regardless of whether it’s a target

I think there are parallels between Deutsch’s ideas about explanation and the concept of coincident vs inherent complexity


This also goes for Goodhart's law itself



This is indeed funny, but the 'tribune' role of finding bad law/process and advocating for its removal is missing from most government, corporate or otherwise, and that's bad.

It is in fact the same phenomenon as treating +SLOC as a proxy for productivity. When everyone is rewarded for adding process, but it isn't anyone's job to remove it, a system inevitably ends up with too much process.


Lines of code is a bad measure even if it's not a target.




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