[exe34]

could you explain what you think the difference is?

a metric is chosen, people start to game the system by doing things that make the metric improve but the original intent is lost. increasingly specific rules/laws have to be made up to make the metric appear to work, but it becomes a lost cause as more and more creative ways are found to work around the rules.

[vasco]

Exactly, that's the definition. It doesn't apply to timing a 100m race. There's many such situations that are simple enough and with perfect information available where this doesn’t break down and a metric is just a metric and it works great.

Which is not to the detriment of the observation being true in other contexts, all I did was provide a counter example. But the example requires the metric AND the context.

[godelski]

Do you know certain shoes are banned in running competitions?

There's a really fine line here. We make shoes to help us run faster and keep our feet safe, right? Those two are directly related, as we can't run very fast if our feet are injured. But how far can this be taken? You can make shoes that dramatically reduce the impact when the foot strikes the ground, which reduces stress on the foot and legs. But that might take away running energy, which adds stresses and strains to the muscles and ligaments. So you modify your material to put energy back into the person's motion. This all makes running safer. But it also makes the runner faster.

Does that example hack the metric? You might say yes but I'm certain someone will disagree with you. There's always things like this where they get hairy when you get down to the details. Context isn't perfectly defined and things aren't trivial to understand. Hell, that's why we use pedantic programming languages in the first place, because we're dealing with machines that have to operate void of context[0]. Even dealing with humans is hard because there's multiple ways to interpret anything. Natural language isn't pedantic enough for perfect interpretation.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN2RM-CHkuI

[exe34]

it wasn't a very good counter example.