systems | complexity | second-order effects
A source of unintended consequences is error.
But where do errors come from? What kinds of errors are there? What can we do to minimize exposure to error?
This is one of the causes of unintended consequences listed by Robert Merton in “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action” (the others being ignorance, short-term vs long-term interests, basic values, and the self-defeating prophecy).
Some destruction is accidental. Some is intentional. Destruction works in different ways. And for different reasons.
These are types of destruction I’ve cataloged. I arranged this list according to what each type of destruction means, methods to achieve, first-order effects, second-order effects, and examples.
(Reminder: first-order effects are the direct, commonly noticeable changes. Second-order effects are the effects of the effects and often not obvious.)
Note that there is a lot of overlap between categories. I didn’t attempt a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive list. That just felt unrepresentative of the messiness of life.
This is a destructive collection that I hope will change the way you think. Continue reading “Destructive Collection (How We Destroy Things)”
I’ve kept these early posts focused on issues that many people can relate to, rather than going into systems theory, complexity, chaos and more. Second-order effects touch the common things we consume, not just the esoteric.
Second-order effects are everywhere — even in the choice of what we eat. But who chooses the choices? Some varieties of crops cannot easily be shipped far or produced for large markets. Other varieties are at risk of shocks and therefore put their focused producers and consumers at risk.
Continue reading “Food Follows Function (Why we eat what we eat)”
In under a week it will be the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended hostilities during World War I. While WWI is distant enough in the past to no longer be a constant comparison to the present, those years of conflict still echo today. The war was a relatively short period when many things changed.
Thousands of others have already written at length about the first modern war and its consequences. These works fill entire libraries. Instead, here I look at what enduring technologies and strategies WWI gave opportunity to arise.
There are many frameworks with which to evaluate unintended consequences. So far in my writing here I’ve looked at examples arranged around a theme (species introduction, food, government policy, human behavior etc) where there is a somewhat clear relationship between cause and effect (even if sometimes only in hindsight). I haven’t yet touched frameworks of complexity and won’t do so until I go deeper into more second-order effects.
This week I step back and look at basic categories of unintended consequences and call out potential new areas of exposure to second-order effects.
There are times when unintended consequences spring from bottom-up group behavior and times when these effects spring from enforced, top-down policy. This post deals with a few examples of top-down decisions that changed food supplies (and more) in unexpected ways.
Results include mass starvation, possibly the plague, and warehouses of moldy cheese. Continue reading “Food from Thought (Production Policies)”
A unintended consequence pattern I’m watching that seems to determine which problems get attention and action: are they visible/simple or hidden/complex?
What is highly noticeable, and maybe in some sense bad, gets more blame than it deserves. But the bigger problems are unseen.
Further to this, people take actions on the noticeable things (or problems) when only one step is required to see an impact. People avoid other, perhaps more important, things that require multiple steps for there to be impact.
This is an evolving thought that I call “The Kudzu Effect” for some of the parallels to the vine’s history. Here are just a couple examples. I’ll return to this idea in the future.
I write these posts to call attention to common phenomena that make the world work differently than we might think. One less discussed type of unintended consequence is the “self-defeating prophecy,” or “self-negating prediction,” where the existence of a prediction or belief ultimately leads to the opposite of what is expected.
Continue reading “The Self-Defeating Prophecy (and How it Works)”
After last week’s post I became interested in the way acclimatization societies created unintended consequences from non-native species introduction around the world. Those societies sometimes introduced species without thought to impact on the local environment. More recently, governments developed environmental protection regulations to protect endangered species. These regulations have had Cobra Effect type second-order effects as well. Let’s look at why and what we could do instead. Continue reading “Importing Risk and Risky Regulations”
So far I’ve only written about human systems and the unintended consequences that arise from them. But the “natural world” is complex also. We are just beginning to understand the interconnections of living and non-living things. Environmental ecosystems can also be pushed in one direction or another by human intervention and other activity. That means plenty of second-order effects.
Ecosystems are often complex beyond our ability to appreciate them, but on the surface they can seem simple. Maybe this is why there have been so many attempts to alter ecosystems by adding to them or subtracting from them. The impact of those additions or subtractions can tough to know in advance, but the impact can be estimated and controlled. Beyond intentionally changing an ecosystem, there are also all of the non-human changes that occur.
Continue reading “Don’t Touch Anything (Species Introductions)”