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Comment by godelski

1 day ago

Here's a less pedantic version:

An academic researcher isn't hired to do research, but publish papers.

Similar to TFA, I think the issue is more about alignment than anything. Goodhart's Law creeps up slowly and can destroy any business or industry. Both can also stay off alignment for an uncomfortable amount of time. In our research example, I think it is clear we want our researcher to actually be doing research and that paper publication is a (measurable) natural result of that work, but it should be a bit more obvious to see that there are ways to increase your publication rate without increasing your research rate (or even increase your publication rate at the cost of your research rate). (Obviously I disagree with TFA's point)