Goodhart's Law is usually quoted in economics — 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure' — but the nineteenth-century German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey diagnosed something deeper underneath it. Dilthey spent his career studying how humans make sense of lived experience versus how institutions reduce that experience to measurable units. His term for the rich, interpreted texture of actual experience was Erlebnis — the felt sense of what's happening — and he distinguished it sharply from Erfahrung, the processed, abstracted account of experience that gets stored, transmitted, and managed. The danger he identified was not that metrics are wrong. It's that once you build infrastructure around a metric — dashboards, OKRs, alert thresholds, performance reviews — the metric stops tracking Erlebnis and starts replacing it. Engineers begin optimizing for p99 latency instead of whether the product feels fast. Product teams hit activation-rate targets while users quietly lose the thread of why they opened the app. The Erlebnis evaporates; the Erfahrung remains, tidily formatted. The practical move is not to abandon measurement but to build in a regular practice of returning to raw experience — sitting with an actual user session, reading support tickets before the summary, shipping a feature yourself before it launches. The numbers tell you what happened. Only Erlebnis tells you what it was like.

In the last month, which metric in your work do you trust most — and when did you last verify it against direct, unprocessed experience of the thing it claims to measure?

Drawing from German Hermeneutics (Dilthey) — Wilhelm Dilthey