4 ms·

This may be a dumb question, but is there a field of study of unintended consequences?

• beamatronic 6y ago
  In many cases, that's economics.
• staticautomatic 6y ago
  Closest I can think of is failure mode analysis.
• seltzered_ 6y ago
  Complexity Theory / Santa Fe Institute folks might be in this domain. Jordan Hall recommends this book for starters: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/thousand-years-nonlinear-history https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/thousand-years-nonlinear-hist...
• Frost1x 6y ago
  I would say emergence and emergentism come to mind which captures many of these sort of ideas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence Oh and systems theory also comes to mind for more rigorous attempts at study: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory
• baddox 6y ago
  Game theory is concerned with what will happen in interactions between actors with certain strategies and goals, so unintended consequences tends to come up a lot. Public choice theory and social choice theory are related disciplines which concern themselves with the outcomes of various political and social mechanisms for making collective decisions based on individuals preferences and behaviors.