Jennifer Pahlka: belief

Transcript context

…There’s a profit — clear goal. In government, it’s not the same kind of outcome. It collapses more into process. Yes, it collapses more into process, absolutely. I think also you have — what is it — Goodhart’s Law that says once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be useful, and you see that everywhere in government. I think that’s part of what I mean about the new public management and the reinventing government in the ’90s was highly reliant on “Let’s set a goal and follow that goal.” There can be real value in that. I’m not discrediting it entirely, but you do have that erosion of the value of those targets as people try to meet the target without actually meeting the outcome that was intended. I think that a more digital transformation approach that is instead able to change over time more quickly and say, “Wait, this target is no longer helping us get where we wanted to go. We’ve got to iterate on that. Let’s change it.” That can really, I think, get us out of that industrial era of thinking. How should we prepare government for AGI coming?…

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