[hinkley]

Technical debt is all of the forms of self-sabotage that don't have clear metrics associated with them.

If they had clear, unimpeachable metrics, then you could increase your status by fixing them. Since they don't, few people engage with them. Worse, engaging with some of these problems can lose you status, and so tackling them becomes a form of self-sacrifice.

[WalterSear]

Hinkleys's law: A measure that becomes a target might cease to be a good measure, but a target that isn't measured ceases to be a target at all.

[kubanczyk]

Does this law apply also to projects like Linux Kernel or Wikipedia? If not, where does it apply?