Paving the road to hell with good intentions: four examples of good actors screwing things up

Image made by Spencer with Midjourney
Good things often get taken too far. They can take on a life of their own through self-perpetuation, get over-zealously applied, or become hijacked. This often turns good things into mixed things and sometimes even corrupts them into bad things. Here are four interesting examples: (1) Zoning laws in the U.S. helped solve problems (like keeping pollution-spewing factories away from people’s homes and helping keep cities pleasant). Later, they got used in a way that increased ...
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Robust Good

People often underestimate how brittle attempts to improve the world are. Altruism, at a large scale, often hinges on a chain of assumptions/requirements, such as: A & B & C & D & E One broken link in the chain means it looks like you're doing good but you're not really doing it. For example, to help the world by delivering medicine, the chain might look like this: The medicine reliably cures the disease & the side effects are not worse than being...
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