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yew comments on The Stable State is Broken - Less Wrong Discussion
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The idea seems to be in essence a restatement or reapplication of Campbell's Law: A system's metrics and its goals are not equivalent, so successful behavior tends to become deranged. Though they are not quite the same idea.
Not to say that expounding upon the idea is a bad thing. Your examples are quite elegant.
Campbell's Law posits that a metric is used because it has historically correlated with a difficult-to-measure desirable property; but that it becomes deranged only when it is used to make decisions that the measured people care about.
Historically, better-educated students do well on standardized tests, when those tests don't matter. But once you enact a test to discriminate amongst students for purposes those students care about (like getting into prestigious colleges), your measurement of academic achievement will be confounded by your measurement of test-taking skills.
Certainly. I think the same principle applies in many of the listed cases, though. Scientific publications in particular likely developed their current standards at least partially because in the past they filtered for genuinely revolutionary results.
One might as easily say that Campbell's Law is a sub-principle of the observed phenomenon.