A causal chain. Obviously.

There's a very common thing that humans do: a person makes an observation about something they dislike, so they go ahead and make an effort to change that thing. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. If it doesn’t work, there can be a variety of reasons for that – maybe the thing is very difficult to change, maybe the person lacks the specific skills to change the thing, maybe it depends on the behavior of other people and the person is not successful in convincing them to act differently. But there's also one failure mode which, while overlapping with the previous ones, is worthy to highlight: imagine the thing the person dislikes is the outcome of a reasonably complex process. The person observes primarily this outcome, but is partially or fully ignorant of the underlying process that causes the outcome. And they now desperately want [...]

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Outline:

(01:44) Three Examples

(01:47) Productivity in a Company

(04:33) Diversity of a Community

(08:16) Interactions in a Zoom Call

(10:34) What Causes This Pattern?

(11:34) Isn’t this the Same as “Treating Symptoms instead of Root Causes”?

(13:35) So What Can We Do?

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
June 22nd, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4F4Wenko2ihgGJHhb/applying-force-to-the-wrong-end-of-a-causal-chain

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Applying Force to the Wrong End of a Causal Chain” by silentbob

LessWrong (30+ Karma)