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Sniffnoy comments on The Importance of Goodhart's Law - Less Wrong
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Getting back to trying to propose practical mitigation strategies for goodhart's law, I propose a fairly simple solution: Choose a G*, evaluate performance based on it, but KEEP IT SECRET. This of course wouldn't really work for national scale, GDP-esque kind of situations, but for corporate management situations it seems like it could work well enough. If only upper management knows what G* is, it becomes impossible to optimize for it, and everyone has to just keep working under the assumption they're being evaluated on G.
Taking it a step further, to hedge against employees eventually figuring out G* and surreptitiously optimizing for it, you could have a bounty on guessing G* - the first employee who figures out what the mystery metric G* really is gets a prize, and as soon as it's claimed, you switch to using G**
Presumably finding arbitrarily many basic G*'s will be hard. Two ideas for dealing with this: 1. Even if you only have finitely many and they're all known, you could select one at random each time there's a switch. 2. Each time there's a switch, select a somehow-random linear (or some other sort, if you like) combination of your basic G*'s. (That would make guessing it in the first place quite hard, actually...)