But it’s even harder to predict the sign when the impact in question is on other people—e.g., on their choice of career—since you have limited visibility into their reasoning or goals, and nearly zero control over what actions they choose to take as a result.
It is hard to predict this, but I think we could have done better (and can do better in the future still).
That may be, but personally I am unpersuaded that the observed paradoxical impacts should update us that the world would have been better off if we hadn’t made the problem known, since I roughly can’t imagine worlds where we do survive where the problem wasn’t made known, and I think it should be pretty expected with a problem this confusing that initially people will have little idea how to help, and so many initial attempts won’t. In my imagination, at least, basically all surviving worlds look like that at first, but then eventually people who were persuaded to worry about the problem do figure out how to solve it.
(Maybe this isn’t what you mean exactly, and there are ways we could have made the problem known that seemed less like “freaking out”? But to me this seems hard to achieve, when the problem in question is the plausibly relatively imminent death of everyone).
It is hard to predict this, but I think we could have done better (and can do better in the future still).
That may be, but personally I am unpersuaded that the observed paradoxical impacts should update us that the world would have been better off if we hadn’t made the problem known, since I roughly can’t imagine worlds where we do survive where the problem wasn’t made known, and I think it should be pretty expected with a problem this confusing that initially people will have little idea how to help, and so many initial attempts won’t. In my imagination, at least, basically all surviving worlds look like that at first, but then eventually people who were persuaded to worry about the problem do figure out how to solve it.
(Maybe this isn’t what you mean exactly, and there are ways we could have made the problem known that seemed less like “freaking out”? But to me this seems hard to achieve, when the problem in question is the plausibly relatively imminent death of everyone).