Bayesian Investor Blog

I am often when people who produce bad results via poorly thought out policies are said to have good intentions.
Too many people divide intentions into two binary categories – good and bad. I prefer to see intentions as ranging along a continuum, with one extreme for plans that involve meticulous research to ensure that the results that the wisest people would expect are consistent with altruism, and the other extreme for plans where anyone can see that the expected results will be unnecessary harm. Most intentions fall in the middle of this spectrum, with people not intending any harm but allowing their expectations to be biased by their self-interest (often their self-interest in appearing altruistic).
It’s unrealistic to expect people to change the way they describe intentions so that it fully reflects such a continuum, so I’ll encourage people to take a smaller step and replace the current Manichean dualism with three categories of intentions – good (resulting from unusual effort to ensure desirable results), normal (i.e. most intentions), and bad (where we expect that the person was aware that the results involve unnecessary harm).