Gain-of-Dysfunction

Gain-of-Dysfunction — It's when people, whatever their motives, set out to deliberately pursue ends that just a bit of honest research and reflection would suggest are ill-considered and almost certain to lead to bad outcomes. Some popular examples include:

Advocating Socialism: With few or no exceptions, socialism always results in poverty, and often in widespread starvation. In contrast, private property and free markets — what most people mean when they say "capitalism" — have produced the wealthiest and most secure societies in history with the largest and most comfortable middle classes.

Pushing "Green" Energy: It sounds great, but wind and solar are inappropriate for grid-scale power generation. That is, for the kind of power that homes and businesses rely on to function. Adding lots of wind and solar to the grid makes electricity more expensive and the grid less reliable. It eventually leads to brownouts, blackouts, and potentially catastrophic failures. Because physics.

Practicing Affirmative Action: When you elevate trivial details of ethnicity above merit, you end up with lower quality employees. In the worst cases, you get what Cambridge got: guys like Jason Arday, frauds and charlatans who parlay their ersatz victim-group status into underserved positions. They make their supporters look stupid and, ironically, undermine respect for everyone who looks like them. In every case, favoring identity x over merit means people will inevitably come to see people of identity x as less capable than others. This is because that will be their "lived experience."

Embracing the Unchecked Immigration of an Incompatible Culture: That's a mouthful, but it simply describes what's happening in Europe right now. When you allow in millions of people who are antithetical to your values, you end up losing your culture. So Europe now has large populations of Muslim immigrants (and their children) who think it's okay to rape women and girls, beat gays and Jews, and murder non-Muslims.

Ignoring Mental Illness: Whether embracing the nonsensical idea that sex is an illusion and that boys can be girls, or excusing rampant homelessness with its tent cities and widespread theft and looting, catering to people with psychological problems is bad for them, and, usually, bad for everyone else. Some people need counseling. Some people need institutionalization. Making a virtue of their dysfunction does nothing to make their lives better.

All of these are obvious — or should be obvious — mistakes, as obvious as funding the amplification of the infectious qualities of novel respiratory viruses.