systems | complexity | second-order effects
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)”
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)”
I want to see mainstream autonomous vehicles (AVs), but I remain bearish about mainstream high-level autonomy.
My reasons for bearishness are not related to the technology that powers self-driving cars, or demand for AVs. Instead, it’s the systemic risk that wide-scale AV deployments create. What will change when we have numerous fully autonomous cars on the road?
Most of the commentary about AVs doesn’t consider second-order effects in their deployment so I’d like to start a discussion on that. (In this post I take high-level autonomy as a technological eventuality and assume a political climate that supports that.)
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”
When two sides remain in battle for long, they co-evolve. This is seen in the natural world in everything from the toughening of grasses vs strengthening of herbivore teeth and stomachs to the changing shape of flowers and bird beaks or insect probosces.
In the man made world we see co-evolution in too many pair situations to count. Here are a few such “games,” each operating on the health of the players in a different way: Continue reading “Uncertainty Saves Lives – the Peltzman Effect”
When studying unintended consequences and second-level thinking, the least common category of example is the unexpected benefit. This is a positive, yet unexpected or unpredictable outcome from an action.
Compare against the unexpected drawback (unexpected detriments that occur in addition to the desired effect of the solution) and the perverse result (the “solution” makes the problem worse).
And a scan of common examples makes me believe that some of what we call unexpected benefits are improperly classified.