Humans Are Like Crabs Competing for Mates

On Credentialism, Goodheart's Law, and the Disenchantment of Academia

Goodheart’s Law states that when you make any measure the goal, the measure loses its value. For example, in education. If you make high grades the goal of education, grades stop being a measure of students’ intellectual growth and ability. The grade becomes, instead, a measure of who was a better cheater. And it promotes people with lower cognitive abilities ahead of geniuses.

In education, Goodheart’s Law means that 1) students will focus on getting grades over learning, 2) students only learn what is required for the test, 3) teachers only teach to the test, and 4) schools, students, and teachers all game the system to optimize their grades and ranking. For example, one school simply reorganized itself to crank up its national ranking, but without actually improving education. It did, however, triple its enrollment fees.

It’s not just education affected by Goodheart’s Law. It’s everywhere humans compete and have devised a system of measures to determine a winner, i.e., in schools (grades and diplomas), in academia (funding acquired), in business (bottom line), in law (cases won), in politics (big plans put to law). And so on, and so forth.

Example: if you would reward soldiers for numbers of enemies killed, they will kill women, children, and civilians, and declare them enemies, without actually defeating the enemy military.

As a formerly naive person, I get to reminisce about the shock revelations that brought me to my senses. I remember, for example, the shock insight that no one I went to high school with cared about their intellectual growth whatsoever. Kids were cheating on exams only to get higher grades, and to get into other schools or jobs i.e., jobs that paid more. My peers studied only the material they knew was going to be “on the test”, disregarding all other knowledge that “wasn’t necessary”.

For most average people, education just means doing whatever is needed to get the house and family they dream of having. For some kids, it means just doing what is necessary to attend more summer festivals. Goodheart’s Law then works both ways: Institutions declaring certain measures as goals, and people in those institutions adding their own goals. Life, then, becomes a juggle as we weigh our own goals against the institutional goals.

Why does any of this matter? It matters if societies still need actual competence, understanding, and ability to operate. It is therefore my conclusion that Western civilization, along with every other civilization following our track, is doomed. We are all lemmings marching toward what I dub “Goodheart’s Abyss”, that declining, withering end of meaningless activity toward increasingly unattainable goals.

The greatest shock I suffered was when I realized that the entire Western education system is a fraud designed to put cheaters in charge of our societies. No wonder, then, that our world has become so materialistic, so driven by a hunger for money. Cheating to get good grades was a conditioning event to produce entire generations of people who only cared to “do whatever is necessary to earn more points”, whether these points were grades, paychecks, or national GDP.

The rat that runs the maze doesn’t care about the architecture. It cares about finding the reward. Academics, professors, teachers, and students are no different from rats, in this perspective. The education system has become a business in which outcome-focused people thrive. The most effective winners of this system are the ones who do only what is necessary to win. Wining means: to make more money, to win the funding, to get the mortgage for the house.

Arguably, it is the people with the less-than-average intelligence who are forced to play to win, since they do not possess the capacity for intellectual growth. Why should they waste their time developing and sculpting their minds, like ancient Greek philosophers did? As natural-born materialists, their eye is on the prize (a house, a car, a prestigious job, a mate, kids, three holidays, and a pet dog), not on understanding the world.

We’ve become crabs. How would you behave if you had been born a crab? You wouldn’t be studying Plato or Seneca. You would be crawling around like a crab doing whatever crabs need to do to meet their needs for food, warmth, and sex. Both kids and their professors in academia behave as crabs. Teachers teach to the test in order to win higher places in teacher rankings. Kids learn to the test in order to pass school and win better jobs.

As with crabs, the competition is so fierce that there is no room for intellectual development. You just focus on whatever is needed to win. The thinkers are at a true disadvantage here. Those who enjoy thinking, researching, writing, and reading as part of a process to learn and advance their minds will generally be defeated by the far larger number of opportunists.

Truth is, most people don’t belong in education.