On Pessimization - by Richard Ngo - Mind the Future

When people set an ambitious goal, they can fail simply by not changing the world very much. But there’s another surprisingly common way to fail: by achieving the opposite of their goal. I call this effect pessimization: the opposite of optimization. Though pessimization is an uncommon term, it’s not an uncommon concept. We allude to it whenever we call someone their own worst enemy, or predict that their actions will backfire. We try to take advantage of it with reverse psychology. It’s the subject of Robert Conquest’s third law of politics: “the simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” And the POSIWID aphorism (“the purpose of a system is what it does”) is often used to describe ways in which a system actively opposes its nominal purpose. I’ve also previously described the pessimization of ideological advocacy under the heading of “the activist’s curse”. I divide pessimization into three types

When people set an ambitious goal, they can fail simply by not changing the world very much. But there’s another surprisingly common way to fail: by achieving the opposite of their goal. I call this effect pessimization: the opposite of optimization. Though pessimization is an uncommon term, it’s not an uncommon concept. We allude to it whenever we call someone their own worst enemy, or predict that their actions will backfire. We try to take advantage of it with reverse psychology. It’s the subject of Robert Conquest’s third law of politics: “the simplest way to explain the behavior of any bu