It depends what you mean by “rough proxy”, and whether you’re applying it to scientific papers (where Goodhart has been out in force for decades, so a one-time check is off the table) or to LessWrong posts (where citation-count has never been something people cared about). Most things have zero citations, and this is indeed a negative quality signal. But after you get to stuff that’s cited at all, citation count is mainly determined by the type and SEO of a paper, rather than its quality. Eg this paper. Citations also don’t distinguish building upon something from criticizing it. That’s much worse in the Goodhart arena than the one-time arena, but still pretty bad in the one-shot case.
It depends what you mean by “rough proxy”, and whether you’re applying it to scientific papers (where Goodhart has been out in force for decades, so a one-time check is off the table) or to LessWrong posts (where citation-count has never been something people cared about). Most things have zero citations, and this is indeed a negative quality signal. But after you get to stuff that’s cited at all, citation count is mainly determined by the type and SEO of a paper, rather than its quality. Eg this paper. Citations also don’t distinguish building upon something from criticizing it. That’s much worse in the Goodhart arena than the one-time arena, but still pretty bad in the one-shot case.
Nod. “positive vs disagreement citation” is an important angle I wasn’t thinking about.