CONCEPT
Campbell's Law
The principle — stated by Campbell in 1976 — that any quantitative indicator used for decision-making will be corrupted by the pressure it creates, and will distort the process it was intended to monitor.
Campbell's Law states: the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures, and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. The mechanism is evolutionary in precisely the sense Campbell's broader framework describes: agents under selection pressure adapt to the environment that selects them. When the environment is a metric, agents adapt to the metric. The adaptation is rarely dishonest and almost never conscious — it is the predictable behavior of organisms responding to selection pressure by optimizing whatever the environment rewards. Standardized test scores corrupt education, crime statistics corrupt policing, readmission rates corrupt hospital care, and productivity multipliers, Campbell's framework predicts with structural certainty, will corrupt the AI-augmented workplace.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The law applies with devastating precision to the AI moment's favorite metric: the productivity multiplier. Edo Segal's twenty-fold gain in Trivandrum is