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Strong Goodhart and overfitting

Nov 04, 20261 min read

Strong Goodhart and overfitting

Jascha Sohl-Dickstein. Too much efficiency makes everything worse: overfitting and the strong version of Goodhart’s law.

The essay argues that sufficiently strong optimization of a proxy can worsen the underlying goal. Its overfitting analogy informs Goodhart’s law and Better scores can hide worse outcomes.


Backlinks

  • The case for AI risk, step by step
  • Goodhart's law
  • Jascha Sohl-Dickstein
  • Better scores can hide worse outcomes

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