Longtime Slashdot reader Stunt Pope writes: Customer Feedback surveys are now near-ubiquitous, subjecting us all to near-Black Mirror-esque pursuit to “rate your experience” for everything from going to the bank to ordering a pizza. Thanks to The Curse of Goodhart’s Law, all of these surveys are beyond useless and even damaging. Mark Jeftovic writes in a blog post: “The shop/hire-rate-reward feedback loop has become baked-in to some systems. Many live marketplaces incorporate these feedback transactions into ratings, which then become a score which then impacts future prospects of whomever is being rated. And that’s where the trouble starts. There is a point where this stops being useful and the knock-on effects of a ratings system predicated on feedback results becomes counter-productive. That point is when the ratings become targets. When a company decrees ‘All customer feedback ratings must score a minimum of X, or else…’ the company has just commenced the process of invalidating and corrupting all useful information to be gleaned from that feedback/survey process. A label which captures this concept is ‘Goodhart’s Law’ — after economist Charles Goodhart, who posited in essence that ‘when a measure becomes a target, it becomes useless.'”

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Source: Slashdot – Customer Feedback Surveys Could Be Considered Harmful