The road to hell is paved with good intentions

Since we underestimate how complex reality is, our actions often lead to unintended consequences. This is why road safety laws lead to more deaths, attempts to suppress information only popularizes it, and bad outcomes follow from good intentions. Let's dig in...

In British India, cobras were slithering rampant in New Delhi. The government announced a bounty for cobra catchers, but people then started breeding cobras to collect bounties. When the scheme ended, the cobras, now bred, were set free. Problem worse than it was before.

In Munich, half the taxis were installed with Anti-Lock Brakes and the other half weren't. Over 3 years, the cabs with ABS crashed MORE. Feeling safer, their drivers compensated by driving more recklessly. This is "risk homeostasis" - make something safer and people gamble more.

Bicyclists are vulnerable to road crashes. So Australia made bicycle helmets mandatory in 1990. Two things happened - helmeted riders took more risk, and the young, feeling helmets to be lame and uncool, stopped cycling altogether. Health benefits of cycling were lost...

Barbra Streisand was pissed that a blog called Pictopia published pictures of her home. She sued them. Before the lawsuit, only 6 people had seen the pictures. 2 of them were her lawyers. After, Pictopia got more than 400,000 hits on their website. This is the “Streisand Effect."

Rabbits were introduced in the New Zealand habitat so they could be hunted for food. But they bred uncontrollably and have become a major pest species. Cane toads were brought to Australia to control canefield pests, but they became the pest. Nature is full of surprises...

John Gall’s underrated 1975 book Systemantics beautifully explains how unintended consequences make large scale systems fail over time. You can read a 2 minute summary here. Discover why even the Pyramids were an unintended consequence….

Unintended consequences in biology. Male deer evolved to have giant antlers because it made them more impressive to females. But now some deer have heavy antlers that make them slower and more susceptible to getting stuck in branches (and shot by hunters.)

Sesame is the 9th biggest allergen in the US now, and so Joe Biden’s FDA department passed a law demanding all products with whiffs of it be labeled. Instead of creating sesame free products, manufacturers started adding sesame to EVERYTHING. This is because...

It was cheaper to add sesame and glue a label on instead of ensuring entire factories free of any sesame. The consequence has been more products with sesame, not less, including ones which didn’t have any before. Those with a sesame allergy left worse off than before...