Posted on by porlando

100 Posts on Unintended Consequences

If you wonder why I’m interested in unintended consequences, just look at what enabled a single ship to block a major shipping lane for a week.

The list of unintended consequences is long. A fallen tree and software bug cut electric power to an entire region, a pain medication for dying cows kills vultures, a search for efficiency in grocery stores turns honest people into thieves. Politics and cotton production in one country impact major apparel producers, intentional species introductions go awry, smart people work to improve business client revenue outcomes at the expense of customer lives. Only some are famous, but all are fascinating in their own ways.

In spite of those handful of examples and a long list of others, I still often hear a kind of excuse. The excuse is that there are always one in a million outcomes, no one can predict them, that trying to account for everything makes progress too slow.

I don’t want to slow progress. I do want to learn about change. A few years ago I started to write essays on such things.

My writing ended up in media like Exponential View, The Browser, TechCrunch, law school journals, Marginal Revolution, Human Risk Blog, as well as being popular on Reddit and Hacker News. People reached out about my writing and I spoke on some podcasts. That plus reader comments and encouragement kept me going.

A couple weeks ago I finished my 100th original post. That seems like a milestone so I wrote this summary (list of the 100 articles at bottom).

Writing. With more connections in our world today, it’s important to learn about unintended consequences and systems.

How did I actually approach such a big topic? I researched and wrote most of my posts in inconvenient and unpredictable ways. Pre-dawn reading and note-taking. Forming an outline mentally while walking to a meeting (pre-COVID) or just walking around the neighborhood. Remembering, while in the shower, an example I read years ago.

I wrote most of my notes and outlines longhand. I never got the hang of any note-taking software. Friends spoke to me about Roam and other mind-mapping tools but I never found the discipline to use them.

A few years ago I sadly gave away 98% of my book collection. On at least 25 pre-COVID occasions I went to the library to borrow a book I used to own and flipped pages to find the example I remembered. On at least 25 other occasions I found other books, new to me, that provided material for the posts. I luckily made a library trip one of my last public outings pre-COVID so I still have a pile of books to read.

I also saw ideas in research papers, Tweets, offhand comments, followed links, and changed direction repeatedly.

The only need was that my interest remained.

Commitment. After a few months of writing posts I started sending them out in a weekly email. That artificial deadline focused my energy. As expected, the deadline also had tradeoffs. I started to care about whether people read the emails! A weekly timeline also meant that on a few occasions I sent out posts when I should have let them simmer a bit longer. Then again, the timeline helped me produce much more than I would have otherwise. I estimate that my 100 articles total at least 150,000 words.

I think such weekly schedules are good for writers who focus on breaking news and less so for those like me who try to connect dots within and across environments. Also, I have the day job (maybe two) and I came up against the limit of how much time I had to think, read, reflect, and write.

It took me a year to put my name on my writing. I don’t know if I am better for it.

On a few occasions I acted on my thinking and benefitted. I’m not claiming anything different than typical investors. I just may have come to the conclusions in different ways.

But I like writing. During the last summer I connected some other dots and as a break from unintended consequences wrote a short book on company growth patterns.

Differences. Casual conversations that overlapped with my writing turned out surprisingly for the other parties. Topics that I covered, like UBI, pandemics, self-driving cars, mosquito eradication, scale effects, university funding, disinformation and more just changed for me. I was surprised how few opinions are out there and how many opinions seem to be created somewhere other than the speakers’ minds. Storytellers capture dramatic amounts of our brainspace.

I saw otherwise smart people become unable to think if it meant going against their political side or a social norm. It was painful for me to write about that in posts, especially because I had to wade through poorly thought-through writing. I tried to avoid political topics since just figuring out what is really happening takes a lot of effort. And then I don’t feel better for it. We almost guarantee exposure to education but don’t also require that people think for themselves. There are lots of words exchanged, but I struggled to find meaning in them.

I created awkward silence by having different opinions than the norm. But I only had those opinions because I first thought through the situations and wrote about them.

I spent enough years reading, working, and living to see that the default case is that things don’t work out as planned. Yet people repeatedly assume that their plans will work out, that a new policy will fix the problems, that a new technology will produce the outcomes its inventors and investors claim. Why do these assumptions continue, especially in a more connected world that is at more risk of unintended consequences?

Here are my 100 articles, in chronological order, running from 2018 to 2021. I’m now working on the next phase of this project.

Yes, I’m taking a break from this speed of writing. In the next phase I’d also like this project to be more sustainable, to include more talks, and perhaps a conference of sorts if that could be done in an engaging way. Beyond that, I’m still considering ideas.

Let me know if you’d like to talk.

Stay well and keep thinking.