Tag Archives: law of unintended consequences

PROMPT: Magic Genie

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Daily writing prompt
You have three magic genie wishes, what are you asking for?
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For any wish number one, wish number two always has to be that one suffer no adverse consequences of the law of unintended consequences (i.e. like Midas who turns his food and even his daughter into solid gold.) Wish number three should be that the receipt of wish number one does not rob one of any experience that makes one a better version of oneself in the long-run (e.g. like the lottery winner who had been chugging along through life just fine and then ends up broke and suicidal because of both the additional pressures and the lack of need to be frugal and satisfied with simple things.)

Personally, I don’t know that it’s worth it. The bill always comes due.

But, if forced:

1.) To be contented with what is.

2.) Healthfulness all around.

3.) To die a good death (in due time.)

PROMPT: Don’t Understand

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Daily writing prompt
What’s something most people don’t understand?
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I’ve often been surprised how little intuitive grasp people have of basic mathematical or statistical ideas or relationships, even when they have had the education to understand with a little effort.

One example of this is what I call “unilateral mathematics” where people fixate on one term or side of an equation while ignoring that changing a term changes the equation’s other side (or to keep the other side static, something else has to give.) For example, I hear people getting so excited by the new salary they will earn when they move to a new place. Then they get to the new locale only to find that the cost of living is so much higher that even their hefty pay boost supports only a diminished quality of life. One sees this tendency a great deal in people’s policy discussions when someone will say, “just set a maximum (or minimum) price” without understanding that shortages or surpluses will come along for the ride. [The Law of Unintended Consequences is another good answer to this prompt.]

We all saw flaws in statistical thinking during the pandemic when people said things like, “See, she got the vaccine and then she got COVID, so obviously the vaccine doesn’t work!” I’m convinced this is because people don’t have good intuition for statistical thinking and — instead — they want to treat a low probability as an impossibility and a high probability as a certainty.

By the way, you see this from people of all persuasions, including those who are highly educated, conservatives, progressives, believers, atheists, etc. One can see the universality of the flaw most commonly in climate change comments. You’ll hear one person say, “See, it’s the hottest day on record, that’s evidence global warming is real!” Another person will say, “See, it’s the coldest day on record, global warming is obviously hokum!” Somehow, even with diametrically opposed viewpoints, these two manage to both be wrong because one day’s WEATHER is not instructive of what is happening to the CLIMATE. In other words, a sample of one provides no insight into state changes in the population. [Maybe it’s more appropriate to use Wolfgang Pauli’s terms and say the two are “not even wrong.”]

PROMPT: Un-invent

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If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

Being acquainted with the Law of Unintended Consequences, there isn’t a thing I’d un-invent. You start arrogantly messing in the natural progression of things, and you never know what kind of monster you’ll birth.

Once upon a time, I might have said nuclear weapons (still a strong contender for ender of our species.) Then again, who knows what kind of horrific World War III we might have had, had we not been forced to sober up a little.