Too much efficiency makes everything worse: overfitting and the strong version of Goodhart’s law
By Jascha Sohl-Dickstein
Free
Added 5 months ago
Description
Over-optimizing efficiency worsens the very goals it aims to achieve, known as Goodhart's law.
Summary
Jascha Sohl-Dickstein discusses the paradox where increasing efficiency can degrade the goals it was meant to enhance, via overfitting and Goodhart's law.
Key Insights
💡 The relationship between overfitting in machine learning and broad societal issues reveals a fundamentally counterintuitive truth about target optimization. 💡 Efficiency optimizations, unless carefully aligned with real goals, can push systems toward dysfunction or collapse.