Hormegeddon

“Hormegeddon”

If you add a little bit of poison to yeast, the yeast grows better. This is “hormesis”: A little of something is good, but if you add a lot of it, that extra can be bad. You need food every day, but if you eat too much, you could get fat and develop diabetes or heart trouble. Exercise, sex, you name it, almost everything is “subject to the law of declining marginal utility.”

Hormegeddon is “what happens when you have too much of a good thing in a public policy context.” Governments create “public policy disasters” when they apply “rational, small-scale problem-solving logic” to “inappropriately broad” situations. Then, these situations move from being fine to escalating gradually into full-blown disasters. Policy makers create hormegeddons when they apply reasoning to “large scale planning” and support it with armed force. Government involvement disrupts the feedback loop – in which trouble tells you something is wrong and needs fixing – and prevents society from learning from the feedback. One side effect is the creation of a class of people who benefit from a disaster.

Modern society requires complex thought. “Public information” cripples that...