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By Staff Reporters and Copilot A.I.
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Goodhart’s law is an adage often stated as, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom:
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
It was used to criticize the British Margaret Thatcher Government for trying to conduct monetary policy on the basis of targets for broad and narrow money, but the law reflects a much more general phenomenon.
And so, aother famous Goodhart’s Law example is the cobra effect, where well-intentioned government policies inadvertently worsened the problem they were designed to solve.
For example, the British colonial government in India, concerned about the increasing number of venomous cobras in Delhi, began offering a bounty for each dead cobra that was delivered. Initially, this strategy was successful as locals brought in large numbers of slaughtered snakes. Over time, however, enterprising individuals started breeding cobras to kill them for supplemental income. When the government abandoned the bounty, the cobra breeders released their cobras into the wild, leading to a surge in Delhi’s snake population.
The cobra effect, where efforts to control a problem lead to unintended and often worse outcomes, serves as a cautionary tale for health care AI. If developers or health care institutions focus too narrowly on specific performance AI metrics, they risk undermining the system’s overall effectiveness, leading to suboptimal patient outcomes. Physicians must be vigilant in ensuring that health care AI systems are not only optimized for performance metrics but are also truly beneficial in practical, clinical applications.
Modified: Dr. Neil Anand via Kevin MD
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Filed under: "Doctors Only", Career Development, Ethics, Experts Invited, Glossary Terms, Health Economics, Information Technology | Tagged: AI, AI Medicine, artificial intelligence, cobra effect, cobras, Goodhart's Law, Goodharts Law Medicine, KevinMD, leadership, Neil Anand, Technology | Leave a comment »
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