Blog - Page 9 of 13 - Unintended Consequences

2019-08-202020-12-17

Selecting the Scalable Snapshot

One of the themes of these posts is that we unintended consequences of a change come from the way it scales.

It is also superficially easier to judge events as at risk of unintended consequences (easier, not more accurate) when there is an image — a snapshot — that represents risk.

So what are causes of difficulty when we make judgments? I’ll go into some examples.

After two back-to-back mass shootings in the US, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted something seemingly logical yet awful (shown later in post). Interestingly, people took offense and attacked him for the apparent logic (he later apologized). His offense: insensitively calling out and comparing the magnitude of different causes of death.

But the problem with Tyson’s tweet wasn’t that at all. Continue reading “Selecting the Scalable Snapshot”

2019-08-062020-12-17

Do We Create Shoplifters?

Those of you who work in a large organization occasionally might find yourself shaking your head thinking about a colleague: “What do they do all day?” Some of you might even think that about yourselves. Or you might think that about people in another department, especially those with whom you have an adversarial relationship.

At the same time, you also might be uncomfortable with the automation of certain tasks and possibly seeing those jobs disappear. Even those jobs of the unproductive humans you shook your head at. Fear of job automation and its unintended consequences has people thinking, but what are the roots of this thought?

Isn’t the history of technology about removing humans from a task and replacing them with machines, even simple ones?

Here’s an example from Vaclav Smil’s book Energy in World History.

Do you really want to be a glass polisher? And do the unintended consequences of job automation include creating shoplifters?

Continue reading “Do We Create Shoplifters?”

2019-07-232020-12-17

The Opioid Crisis (and addiction-based business models)

It’s common for scalable companies with good business models to involve addiction.

I mean addiction in a broad sense. This includes addiction to both physical products and digital goods and services. Addiction is a retention metric.

And retention (how long someone stays a paid customer or user) is what fuels many businesses. Let’s look at this with opioid addiction, focusing on Purdue Pharma’s product OxyContin. What second-order effects drive the opioid crisis?

Continue reading “The Opioid Crisis (and addiction-based business models)”

2019-07-022023-05-22

Prester John and the Long History of Disinformation

In his novel Baudolino, Umberto Eco writes of a medieval letter forging exercise. For their own political purposes, a group of friends write a realistic, but fake, letter addressed to Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor. The fake letter is from Prester John.

Surely you know Prester John?

Let’s look at the tacit tradition of disinformation and what will change in the future. What is changing about the nature of truth? Will it be harder to tell what is true? Or was it always hard? What are the unintended consequences?

Continue reading “Prester John and the Long History of Disinformation”

2019-06-172020-12-17

Why Are There So Many Protests in Hong Kong?

Looking back, we can piece together ways that past choices impact the present. Sometimes choice – impact pairing is direct; other times less so. And while we might identify a set up for future problems, we can’t know how those problems will be expressed. A current example is from Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is in the news again in a sad way. Protesters marched multiple times in opposition to a proposed extradition to China law. In a city of seven million, the turnout was incredible. One protest march had as many as one million and another perhaps two million people. Police fired tear gas, rubber bullets, and beanbag rounds. There is pressure on the Chief Executive to resign. And all this is happening within the greater context of the China – US Trade War.

But if Hong Kong is part of China, why is there even the need for an extradition law?

The situation in Hong Kong is more complicated than that and had many contributing events.

Photographer: Anthony Kwan / Getty Images. The neon sign at left is for a pawnshop.

Here’s a short list. Continue reading “Why Are There So Many Protests in Hong Kong?”

2019-06-042020-12-17

A Very Different Funeral (for Deng Xiaoping)

If you want to get in an argument when you travel (especially internationally), talk about history.

There isn’t a single, correct history. For multiple reasons, places around the world treat history differently than other subjects. The ways we deal with uncomfortable topics include suppressing, not learning, and biasing others. Continue reading “A Very Different Funeral (for Deng Xiaoping)”

2019-05-282020-12-17

The Emergence of Omniscience (Part 1 – Images)

We are in an early transition period of omniscience. We are transitioning from some personal actions that are recorded only through our memories to many events being recorded, re-playable, and shareable. By “personal actions” I mean anything from what content you consume to where you go to how you act. By “re-playable and shareable” I mean that some device or system collects data that can be stored for any length of time and then easily sent to others to observe.

Continue reading “The Emergence of Omniscience (Part 1 – Images)”

2019-05-142020-12-17

The Cobra Effect (Part 2)

When I started this project to learn about unintended consequences, my first post to go viral (top page of Hacker News) was about the Cobra Effect. The Cobra Effect is another name for “perverse results,” or how when we want more (or less) of something, we sometimes instead create the conditions that produce the opposite of our intended outcomes. In that post I took three well-known examples of the cobra effect and invented antidotes for them.

Those well-known Cobra Effect examples all involved animals (cobras, rats, and pigs) and so my antidotes were based around the animals’ reproductive cycles. I made the claim that those animal examples had the solution built into the problem. Readers loved it (creative look at an old topic!) and readers hated it (you can’t stop the Cobra Effect!).

Since the Cobra Effect is a type of unintended consequence that keeps coming up, I decided to write part two. Continue reading “The Cobra Effect (Part 2)”

2019-05-062025-10-05

The Clip (What’s the Right Amount of Context?)

How much context is the right amount of context? When we necessarily choose a section — a clip — of a story on which to focus, how do we know we have chosen well?

How far out do we need to zoom? Further to that, what problems are caused by our choice of the clip?

Continue reading “The Clip (What’s the Right Amount of Context?)”

2019-04-232021-01-14

Universal Basic Income (Part 2)

This is a continuation of the Universal Basic Income (UBI) discussion, mostly focused on the impact on entrepreneurship and personal choice of what work-related activities to pursue. (If you missed it, here’s UBI Part 1.)

As in the previous posts, I think we should pause in the face of large top-down decisions. While things can look good in theory, these large-scale changes often bring unintended consequences. How should we look at the systems we will replace? Might there be second-order effects in the case of UBI as well? What system changes will emerge?

What are some entrepreneurship-related unexpected results we could see from top-down UBI in the US? Continue reading “Universal Basic Income (Part 2)”