Posted on

Reversible or Irreversible? (Voting)

At the beginning of WWI, French soldiers entered battle wearing red pants, carrying swords, and depending on rank, had plumes in their caps.

That attire suited previous wars where the technology and tactics used were more similar to the Battle of Waterloo a hundred years earlier than anything they were about to face in 1914.

A lot was to change in WWI, including the first mainstream uses of camouflage, airplanes, radio communication, long-range artillery, high-intensity shelling, submarines, tanks, poison gas, and more.

After WWI there was no return to what now seem like quaint military practices.

We make the same mistake when we look at some risks as being reversible when they are irreversible. How can we tell the difference? Continue reading “Reversible or Irreversible? (Voting)”

Posted on

Basic Values

With this post I have finally written about each of the five causes of unintended consequences that Robert Merton outlined in his 1936 paper “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action” (the other four being error, short-term vs long-term interests, ignorance, and the self-defeating prophecy).

Let’s look at what basic values are, why we have them (if we do), and how they impact us in unexpected ways to generate unintended consequences. Continue reading “Basic Values”

Posted on

The Long Reach of Short-Term Interests

I write these posts in order to explore how systems work, especially the unintuitive, unseen parts of them. One commonly experienced cause of unintended consequences in systems comes from when actors pursue immediate interests, or short-term thinking. 

Short-term interest is one of the causes of unintended consequences listed by Robert Merton in his paper on “Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action” that I’ve referred to in the past (the other causes being error, ignorance, basic values, and the self-defeating prophecy). Merton actually called it the “imperious immediacy of interest,” but I’m sticking with “short-term interest” in this post.

Let’s look at what short-term vs long-term interests are, why we have them, and how they impact us in unexpected ways. Continue reading “The Long Reach of Short-Term Interests”

Posted on

The Self-Defeating Prophecy (and How it Works)


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)”