---
type: claim
domain: collective-intelligence
description: "Schmachtenberger argues that optimization requires a single metric, and single metrics necessarily externalize everything not measured — so the more powerful your optimization, the more catastrophic your externalities. This directly challenges mechanism design approaches (futarchy, decision markets, CI scoring) that optimize for coordination."
confidence: experimental
source: "Schmachtenberger on Great Simplification #132 (Nate Hagens, 2025), Schmachtenberger 'Development in Progress' (2024)"
created: 2026-04-03
related:
- the metacrisis is a single generator function where all civilizational-scale crises share the structural cause of competitive dynamics on exponential technology on finite substrate
- the price of anarchy quantifies the gap between cooperative optimum and competitive equilibrium and applying this framework to civilizational coordination failures offers a quantitative lens though operationalizing it at scale remains unproven
- global capitalism functions as a misaligned autopoietic superintelligence running on human general intelligence as substrate with convert everything into capital as its objective function
supports:
- incremental optimization within a dominant design necessarily undermines that design because autovitatic innovation makes the better you get at optimization the faster you approach framework collapse
reweave_edges:
- incremental optimization within a dominant design necessarily undermines that design because autovitatic innovation makes the better you get at optimization the faster you approach framework collapse|supports|2026-04-18
---

# When you account for everything that matters optimization becomes the wrong framework because the objective function itself is the problem not the solution

Schmachtenberger's most provocative thesis: when you truly account for everything that matters — all stakeholders, all externalities, all nth-order effects, all timescales — you stop optimizing and start doing something categorically different. The reason: optimization requires reducing value to a metric, and any metric necessarily excludes what it doesn't measure. The more powerful the optimization, the more catastrophic the externalization of unmeasured value.

His argument proceeds in three steps:

1. **GDP is a misaligned objective function.** It measures throughput, not wellbeing. It counts pollution cleanup as positive economic activity. It doesn't measure ecological degradation, social cohesion, psychological wellbeing, or long-term resilience. Optimizing GDP produces exactly the world we have — materially wealthy and systemically fragile.

2. **Replacing GDP with a "better metric" doesn't solve the problem.** Any single metric — happiness index, ecological footprint, coordination score — still externalizes what it doesn't capture. Multi-metric dashboards are better but still face the problem of weighting (who decides the tradeoff between ecological health and economic output?). The weighting IS the value question, and it can't be optimized away.

3. **The alternative is not better optimization but a different mode of engagement.** When considering everything that matters, you do something more like "tending" or "gardening" — attending to the full complexity of a system without reducing it to a target. This is closer to wisdom traditions (indigenous land management, permaculture, contemplative practice) than to mechanism design.

**This is a direct challenge to our approach.** Decision markets optimize for prediction accuracy. CI scoring optimizes for contribution quality. Futarchy optimizes policy for measurable outcomes. If Schmachtenberger is right that optimization-as-framework is the problem, then building better optimization mechanisms — no matter how well-designed — reproduces the error at a higher level of sophistication.

**The strongest counter-argument:** Schmachtenberger's alternative ("tending," "gardening," wisdom traditions) has no coordination mechanism. It works for small communities with shared context and high trust. It has never scaled beyond Dunbar's number without being outcompeted by optimizers (Moloch). The reason mechanism design exists is precisely that wisdom-tradition coordination doesn't scale — and the crises he diagnoses ARE at civilizational scale. The question is whether mechanism design can be designed to optimize for the CONDITIONS under which wisdom-tradition coordination becomes possible, rather than trying to optimize for outcomes directly. This is arguably what futarchy does — it optimizes for prediction accuracy about which policies best serve declared values, not for the values themselves.

**The honest tension:** Schmachtenberger may be right that any optimization framework will produce Goodhart effects at scale. We may be right that wisdom-tradition coordination can't scale. Both can be true simultaneously — which would mean the problem is genuinely harder than either framework acknowledges.

## Challenges

- "Optimization is the wrong framework" may itself be unfalsifiable. If any metric-based approach is rejected on principle, the claim can't be tested — you can always argue that the metric was wrong, not the approach.
- The "tending/gardening" alternative is underspecified. Without operational content (who tends? how are conflicts resolved? what happens when tenders disagree?), it's an aspiration, not a framework. Wisdom traditions that work at community scale have specific social technologies (elders, rituals, taboos) — Schmachtenberger doesn't specify which of these scale.
- The claim may conflate "optimization with a single metric" (which is genuinely pathological) with "optimization" broadly. Multi-objective optimization, satisficing, and constraint-based approaches are all "optimization" in the technical sense but don't require reducing value to a single metric.
- Mechanism design approaches like futarchy explicitly separate value-setting (democratic/deliberative) from implementation-optimization (markets). The claim that optimization-as-framework is the problem may not apply to systems where the objective function is itself democratically contested rather than fixed.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[the metacrisis is a single generator function where all civilizational-scale crises share the structural cause of competitive dynamics on exponential technology on finite substrate]] — if the metacrisis IS competitive optimization, then better optimization may be fighting fire with fire
- [[global capitalism functions as a misaligned autopoietic superintelligence running on human general intelligence as substrate with convert everything into capital as its objective function]] — capitalism is the paradigm case of optimization-as-problem: the objective function (capital accumulation) IS the misalignment

Topics:
- [[_map]]