Foxes And Rabbits

Why the Law of Unintended Consequences always catches up in the end

Reality is highly complex, whereas our brains are hardwired for simplicity. During most of our evolutionary history, calories were scarce and uncertain. As the human brain consumes up to 30% of the body’s blood glucose while working hard and thus consumes precious calories that were often needed to power muscles in order to escape from predators or forage for food, it’s not surprising that we evolved to do as little hard thinking as possible and instead rely on simple heuristics.

Furthermore, studies over the last forty years have revealed that we mostly act on a preconscious level and then immediately afterward our brains create “explanations” for why we’ve just done something, in order to ensure we continue to maintain the illusion that we’re in control of our actions.

Not surprisingly, while this paradigm worked well for the hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors lived in the African savanna and the primordial forests of Eurasia, it creates something of a mismatch now that we live in entirely different circumstances.

The problems created by this are legion, but for the purposes of this article we need focus only on the consequences of the fundamental mismatch between our limited cognition and the basic rules of cause-and-effect.