It's also what a lot of AI are optimising for, which is where I think the risk is at the moment: the state of the art in AI has gone from "these things don't have any common sense" to "when common sense and reality diverge, they often go for common sense".
The supremacy of form over function, appearance over substance has
been a dominant feature of our society for a long time. From the mid
90s:
""" Just visit Los Angeles. Just walk down the walk of stars at one
o’clock in the morning, and ask yourself “Are these people really
here, or is this central casting?” And it isn’t a funny
question. And as our society develops in this telematic way, it’s
not going to be funny to ask it around the Christmas dinner table
about Uncle Henry, "Is that Uncle Henry, or is it just someone
playing Uncle Henry?" The further postmodern insight is: what
difference does it make! See, that’s the thing Reagan's handlers
understood. It doesn’t make any difference! They’re buying it! """
-- Rick Roderick
Some might say this observation/trend/etc. is much older than the 1990s, as perhaps exemplified by Oscar Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest in 1895 (where literally all that matters is some one's name being "Earnest"). (Apologies if Shakespeare or the Greek Comedies or other got there first - feel free to cite!)
I think that there is a pernicious impact on many folks because they do "all the right things" and still struggle mightily with their work and responsibilities because doing 80 hard hours of the wrong work doesn't deliver.
Quite right, and I'd say this could be considered an instance of the phenomenon known as (among other names), Goodhart's Law. If we consider superficial appearance of success to be a good proxy for success and hence a good metric to optimize for then we necessarily end up moving away from our original goal.
Been that way a long time. Economics ha something called the axiom of revealed preferences. Behavior only shows you what the person decided among their available options.
