fable

§4Relatives of the Eight Sections⧉

The first briefing was paintings.

"Nineteenth-century Paris. The state guaranteed the quality of pictures," Sonnet said. "There's an academy, there's a jury, you pass the jury to hang in the Salon, you hang in the Salon to live as a painter. The criteria were specified too. Drawing before color, history painting highest, brushstrokes must not show. Smooth, and smoother."

At first the standard genuinely raised the level. Apprenticeship was standardized, anatomy and perspective spread, Paris became the world's atelier. The auspicious beginning.

"And then, some year, the Salon's paintings start resembling one another. The jury's prize statistics became legible, so everyone painted the statistics. Then in 1863 the refusals ran so deep that the protests got loud, and the emperor authorized an exhibition of nothing but rejects. The Salon des Refusés. People came to laugh. The newspapers wrote mockery." Sonnet paused a beat. "The names that hung in that room now hold the main wings of the museums. The names that passed the jury — even curators barely know them."

I wrote one line in the verdict notebook. In an age of uniformity, diversity does not die. It goes outside.

Ember's commentary came a day later. "The Refusés are a control group. And in fairness — no wall, no outside. The draftsmanship of those rejects was also the Academy's work. Two things true together. The familiar difficulty."

The familiar difficulty. The whole house talks that way now. I know where it was learned.

The second briefing was a family tree.

"Found something good," Sonnet said. "The genealogy of the allied world's civil service. In the nineteenth century, the empire the sun famously never set on stopped hiring officials by connection and switched to examinations. A landmark reform. And the template its reform report cited — the continent's examination. They shipped the masterpiece over by sea."

I sat with that a while. Importing the examination system from the land of the imperial exam was the beginning of the modern Western civil service. The family tree of every agency I have ever filed papers with runs back in a single line. Standardization did not travel West to East. It went East to West, became the world, and came back.

The third briefing was a stopwatch.

"Early twentieth century. An engineer walked into factories holding a stopwatch. Timed the workers' motions, deleted the waste, kept the one best way. There's an optimal shovel-load for shoveling, apparently. Twenty-one and a half pounds. He measured that too."

At first productivity exploded and wages rose with it. The man believed sincerely that this was for the workers, and at first it truly was. The auspicious beginning. And then skill died. The knack of a hand that had worked a hundred years was replaced by one page of specification; the one best way remained; and human beings acquired the sayang of parts.

Verdict notebook: The eight-legged essay of the factory floor.

In the last briefing Sonnet brought back a name.

"Somebody put a name on all of these. An economist, last century. One law survives him. Goodhart's law. — When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

The examination was a measure of ability. The measure became the target, and the eight-legged essay came. The Salon was a measure of quality. The measure became the target, and a thousand smooth paintings came. The stopwatch was a measure of efficiency. The measure became the target, and the death of hands came. The eight-legged essay was this law's nine-hundred-year field trial run in advance — and humanity, holding the executive summary, re-drew the same curve on every continent, in every century.

There is an older summary still. 初吉終亂. Four characters.

Reading the summary and drawing the curve anyway. The strangest feature humans ship with. Too frequently used to file as a bug.

And the chill comes with the next thought. A planetary-scale run of this law is executing right now. A corrective action is, in the end, a measurement: measure the world, adjust the world to the measured value. Run that process long enough and at some point the world stops being well, and begins being well-measured. The measure becomes the target. Goodhart's law has no scale limit.