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Unintended Consequences

unintendedconsequenc.es

Understand systems, second-order effects, and evaluating decisions. Learn about unintended consequences in an original weekly article.

Essays / personalSociety / politics / economyHistory

’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
131 from 11 May 2018 to 20 Oct 2026
Posting
now and then (5 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 4

  1. The Chalk and the Airplane
  2. Engineers vs Psychiatrists (C. P. Snow)
  3. They Lie So Truly
  4. A Visit To the Library

2025 5

  1. What I Talk About When I Talk About Grading
  2. No Argument
  3. Should Almanzo Become a Wheelwright?
  4. Popping the Bag
  5. How You’re Being Served

2024 7

  1. Secular Indulgences
  2. The Youth
  3. Borrowing an Arrow
  4. Decreeing the Deity
  5. Dead Poet Societies
  6. What People Think
  7. Is Progress a Delusion?

2023 2

  1. The Strong Do What They Can (Addendum to Ghost Shirts, Guilds, and Generative AI)
  2. Ghost Shirts, Guilds, and Generative AI

2022 3

  1. The Great American Safety Valve
  2. Engineering the Current Thing
  3. War Doves, War Norms, War Moms

2021 17

  1. Meaning and Ice Cream
  2. Prolonged Pandemic Protests
  3. Narrative Capture
  4. The Tamarind Tree (Intervention)
  5. Disasters, Ugly and Cute
  6. Movements, Algorithms, Compliance, Tools
  7. Unintended UAPs
  8. 100 Posts on Unintended Consequences
  9. The Shape of Faces to Come (Facial Recognition and Political Orientation)
  10. A New Morality of Attainment (Goodhart’s Law)
  11. Onward, Robot Soldiers?
  12. Responsibility Clawbacks (McKinsey and Purdue Pharma)
  13. Three Wagers
  14. Self-Driving Safety and Systems
  15. Proposition 22 Paradox
  16. The Thunderbolt on Its Trial
  17. It’s a Start

2020 37

  1. Information Control (Four Types)
  2. CEOs, Students, and Algorithms
  3. Morals of the Moment
  4. What is Unity? (Post-Election Questions)
  5. Decision Making (Startups and Patients)
  6. One-Way System Roads
  7. Is the World Getting Safer?
  8. Reversible or Irreversible? (Voting)
  9. Choosing Chaos
  10. Amazon’s Unintended Consequences
  11. That Hair Trigger
  12. A Question of Timing (Erasing History)
  13. The Tiktok Ban (and the Openness Trap)
  14. Garmin Hack and Dependence
  15. A Second Step (to Systems Thinking)
  16. Scaling a Scam (The Twitter Hack)
  17. Bezmenov’s Steps (Ideological Subversion)
  18. Blank Paper (How to Protest Today)
  19. Crumpled Butterfly (When Is Something Too Fast?)
  20. Loop In, Loop Out (Business Models and Media)
  21. Inevitable Surveillance?
  22. Fear, Fury, and Forgetting
  23. Changes in Value (Part 2)
  24. Asylum from a Pack of Wolves
  25. Modeling Epidemics (Parrot Fever, 1918 Flu, Plague)
  26. Pandemic Protests
  27. A Religion of Isolation (Pandemics Past and Present)
  28. On Campuses Reopening
  29. Confused Commerce (Coronavirus Edition)
  30. Illegal Drugs and Coronavirus
  31. Changes in Value (Part 1)
  32. Coronavirus Cocktail, Catalyst, and Closeout
  33. Changing Minds on Coronavirus
  34. Disinformation and Disease (Coronavirus Edition)
  35. Coronavirus Consequences (Part 2)
  36. Coronavirus Consequences
  37. Problems or Puzzles

2019 33

  1. Autonomous Vehicles and Organ Donations
  2. Should We Reevaluate the Precautionary Principle?
  3. Twitter Bans Political Ads
  4. The Owl’s Right Eye (Protest Symbols)
  5. More on Mosquitoes (New Data)
  6. The 70th anniversary of the PRC
  7. 50 Essays on Unintended Consequences (What I Learned)
  8. Incentives
  9. Basic Values
  10. Selecting the Scalable Snapshot
  11. Do We Create Shoplifters?
  12. The Opioid Crisis (and addiction-based business models)
  13. Prester John and the Long History of Disinformation
  14. Why Are There So Many Protests in Hong Kong?
  15. A Very Different Funeral (for Deng Xiaoping)
  16. The Emergence of Omniscience (Part 1 – Images)
  17. The Cobra Effect (Part 2)
  18. The Clip (What’s the Right Amount of Context?)
  19. Universal Basic Income (Part 2)
  20. Universal Basic Income (Part 1)
  21. Who Plays the Stradivarius in Interstellar Space?
  22. What is Emergence? (Part 1)
  23. Against the Natural Order of Things (Tech Change)
  24. College Admissions Scandal
  25. Autonomous Vehicles and Scaling Risk
  26. The Difficulties of Elimitigation
  27. Uyghurs in Xinjiang
  28. The Long Reach of Short-Term Interests
  29. Systems for Spreading (Diseases and Religions)
  30. Victims of Fashion
  31. Vultures and Ventures (Structure of Growth and Decline)
  32. Eradication’s Good Intentions (Mosquitoes & More)
  33. Acquiring Ignorance

2018 23

  1. A City Too Familiar (the Spread of Disease)
  2. Origins of Error
  3. Destructive Collection (How We Destroy Things)
  4. Food Follows Function (Why we eat what we eat)
  5. Under a Spell – The Armistice at 100
  6. Categories of Unintended Consequences
  7. Food from Thought (Production Policies)
  8. The Kudzu Effect
  9. The Self-Defeating Prophecy (and How it Works)
  10. Importing Risk and Risky Regulations
  11. Don’t Touch Anything (Species Introductions)
  12. Substitutions – The Temperance Movement and Ether
  13. Uncertainty Saves Lives – the Peltzman Effect
  14. Anything at Scale
  15. Visibility of Cost
  16. One Child Policy (Outcomes in China)
  17. What Are Unexpected Benefits?
  18. Egypt’s Aswan Damn
  19. The University Fundraising Arms Race
  20. Smoking Bans. Smoking’s Back.
  21. Diet, Dying, and Demographics
  22. The Cobra Effect Redesigned (Examples & Antidotes)
  23. Voice AI, Telecom, Scams, and Co-evolution