Goodhart's Law and Emotions

I think your condensation of that post you linked to is missing the word "superstimulus" (^f on the linked essay is also missing the term) which is the thing that the modern world adds to our environment on purpose to make our emotions less adaptive for us and more adaptive for the people selling us superstimuli (or using that to sell literally any other random thing). I added the superstimuli tag [? · GW] for you :-)

I read this as saying we’re somehow not ‘true’ to ourselves as we’re doing stuff nature didn’t mean us to do when it originally implanted our emotions.

Indeed, we might look ridiculous from the outside, but who’s there to judge - imho, nature is no authority.

1. Increasing the odometer may be wrong from the owner’s perspective – but why should the car care about the owner? Assume the car, or the odometer itself desires really to show a high mile count, just for the sake of it. Isn’t the car making progress if it magically could put itself on a block?
2. In the human case: Ought we to respect any ‘owner’ of us? A God? Nature who built us? Maybe not! Whatever creates happiness – I reckon it’s one of the emotions you mean – is good, however ridiculous the means to get to that. Of course, better if it creates widespread & long-term happiness, but that’s another question.
3. Not gaming nature’s system – what would that mean? Could it be to try to have as many children or something like that? After that this is what nature wanted to ensure when it endowed us with our proxy emotions. I’m not sure it’s better.
4. Think exactly of the last point. Imagine we were NOT gaming nature’s original intents. Just as much as we desire sex, we’d desire to have actually the maximal number of children instead! The world would probably be much more nightmarish than it is!

Now, if you’re saying, we’re in a stupid treadmill, trying to increase our emotion of (long-term) happiness by following the most ridiculous proxy (short-term) emotions for that, and creating a lot of externalized suffering at the same time, and that we forget that besides our individual shallow ‘happiness’ there are some deeper emotional aims, like general human progress etc., I couldn’t agree more!

Or if you're saying the evolutionary market system creates many temptations that exploit small imperfections in our emotional setup to trick us into behaving ridiculous and strongly against our long-term emotional success, again, all with you, and we ought to reign in markets more to limit such things.