Today, I’m thinking about intentions. Related to my post a few weeks back on bounded rationality, as well as this quote from WSJ’s Charlie Munger interview from a few months ago:
More harm is done by people believing they do the right thing than by people with bad intentions. Fully agree. pic.twitter.com/2AKKOp4f4L
— Kjetil Holmefjord (@kjetil1) May 8, 2019
I don’t believe people are born evil. Further I don’t believe most people try to do evil. Still, a lot of actions done by people end up doing more bad than good.
I believe this has to do with bounded rationality. People believe they do good - their intentions are good, but the outcome is not good - because their view of the world is imperfect, flawed.
I find this whole concept extremely fascinating. We have people all over the world disagreeing with and reacting to other people’s actions as if others have bad, or at least different intentions.
What we really should spend our energy on is understanding in what ways their worldview is bounded or different - then educate them and ourselves to reach a common understanding of the world. At that point we can start discussing actions. Jumping straight to actions is not constructive in any way.