If you get someone to interact in style X that’s normally a signal for Y it stops being a good signal for Y. That’s the basic Goodhard’s law principle.
It’s hard to be charming, rather than just doing a clumsy imitation of charm. If one person is overly practiced at being charming, they might be able to influence their partner’s behavior so that it’s no longer a reliable signal of their level of attraction. This fits with the Goodhart’s law interpretation.
Then again, it might be that in a romantic context, like speed dating, people are being careful to flirt only if they genuinely want to signal attraction. Flirting might even make the participants feel attracted to each other. This would work against Goodhart’s law.
My intuition is that the latter factors are more important than the former, though I do think it’s very possible for people to fall into clumsy imitations of charm, especially at first. But I have to assume that charm is a learned skill like just about everything else, so the clumsy attempts might be just an awkward phase.
If you get someone to interact in style X that’s normally a signal for Y it stops being a good signal for Y. That’s the basic Goodhard’s law principle.
It’s hard to be charming, rather than just doing a clumsy imitation of charm. If one person is overly practiced at being charming, they might be able to influence their partner’s behavior so that it’s no longer a reliable signal of their level of attraction. This fits with the Goodhart’s law interpretation.
Then again, it might be that in a romantic context, like speed dating, people are being careful to flirt only if they genuinely want to signal attraction. Flirting might even make the participants feel attracted to each other. This would work against Goodhart’s law.
My intuition is that the latter factors are more important than the former, though I do think it’s very possible for people to fall into clumsy imitations of charm, especially at first. But I have to assume that charm is a learned skill like just about everything else, so the clumsy attempts might be just an awkward phase.
The study doesn’t measure people being charmed in the sense that they are perceived to be charming by other humans.