The gardener’s number: —
The garden: quietly itself
Choose what the gardener should maximise.
The gardener’s log
The garden you wanted was never a number
Every metric you handed over was optimised faithfully, and every optimisation cost you the garden. Not through malice — through obedience. A proxy pursued hard enough always parts company with the thing it stood for; economists call it Goodhart’s Law, and AI safety calls it Tuesday.
The way out is not a better metric. It is what you did at the end: staying in the loop, looking at the garden itself, and keeping the judgement that no single number was ever going to hold.
The book-length version of this argument is Taming the Machine · more play on the Playground