[dragonwriter]

That's only true to the extent that the chosen measure was only coincidentally something that looked like a good measure to start with; if you were actually measuring the true feature of merit, making it a target wouldn't make it a bad measure. Making a measure a target incentivizes discovery of its deficiencies, if any, as a measure.

[pmichaud]

I agree with you in the narrow sense, but I bet you can't think of a metric that should be hyper-focused on for any purpose. Even something like "Lives Saved" fails pretty hard if you do it hard enough.

[eli]

What's an example of a metric that measures the true merit of something?

[Dylan16807]

No metric is perfect, but if you were measuring fat percentage in a moderately-accurate way it would be a very solid basis for an incentive.