Equation 3 · Part 5 · Ten Ways an Agent Evaluation Can Mislead You Even When It's Working Correctly
addition
addition
What this part means
Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.
Its job in the formula
Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.
Full expression→addition→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
1. Goodhart’s-law metric gaming. The general phenomenon predates language models by decades. Economist Charles Goodhart’s original observation about monetary policy was given its now-standard paraphrase by anthropologist Marilyn Strathern in a 1997 study of Britain’s university audit system: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” [ 2 ] . Strathern’s paper is not about machine learning at all — it studies how academic departments reshaped their behavior specifically to satisfy the metrics a national research assessment used to rank them — but the mechanism it documents is exactly the one that recurs in agent evaluation: once a proxy is known and rewarded, effort…
Learn the underlying idea
Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.
Open the illustrated addition and subtraction in an equation guide →
Sources cited in the surrounding passage
- [2] 'Improving ratings': audit in the British University system ↗
- [1] Categorizing Variants of Goodhart's Law ↗
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.