What's the best treatment ever of why actions so often produce the opposite effect to what is intended?
(Common examples, all needing caveats, just to be concrete: rent control, GDPR, early warnings about AGI x-risk)
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I think most/of those are examples of what Jon Elster called the younger sibling syndrome - failing to see others deliberate, optimising agents. Studying economics may be a bit of an antidote, since it trains you to see people as such agents (indeed it sometimes goes too far in… Show more
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Are these actually examples of the “opposite” being achieved? I think rent control and GDPR at least have had some local positive effects, but global negative effects. Perhaps because applying force in a complex system has unpredictable side effects. (Though GDPR was probably… Show more
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Most of the difficulty in coming up with a new theory is even locating the hypothesis.
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By analogy, a policy to increase X and a policy to decrease X will always look similar, bc they are causally entangled with X.
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