the intense competition to get into Harvard is producing a monoculture of students who’ve lined up every single standard accomplishment and how these students don’t know anything else they want to do with their lives
Yeah, this para was just introducing goodhart’s law in simple language (and without the jargon):
To review, there’s a general idea that strong (social) selection on a characteristic imperfectly correlated with some other metric of goodness can be bad for that metric, where weak (social) selection on that characteristic was good. If you press scientists a little for publishable work, they might do science that’s of greater interest to others. If you select very harshly on publication records, the academics spend all their time worrying about publishing and real science falls by the wayside.
This is Goodhart’s Law run riot, yes?
Yeah, this para was just introducing goodhart’s law in simple language (and without the jargon):