• TheBananaKing@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    Goodhart’s law strikes again.

    They can’t tune their process for ‘win election’, because that’s only one sample every four years, and it’s a binary value.

    So instead they tune it for ‘raise campaign funds’ as a proxy measure for ‘win election’, and that’s vastly more responsive; they can optimise the crap out of that.

    This also means that a bunch of influential people are able to skim significant amounts off the top, so they’re not minded to change it. They’re stinking rich so they don’t have to care about the actual political outcome - and the more people are suffering, the more they’ll donate.

    The trump win was a massive windfall for the next cycle of fundraising.