the intention heuristic.............

 I am not a fan of the desire to do good. I call it the intention heuristic. I think that, on average, profit-seeking businesses do good, and non-profits do harm. But if you insist on doing non-profit work, I think that working for a hands-on charity is less likely to cause harm than working for a cause.

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What I call the intention heuristic takes two forms:

Good intentions necessarily lead to good consequences.

Bad consequences necessarily indicate that someone had bad intentions.

True wisdom requires discarding the intention heuristic. It requires accepting that the world is complex and that each individual is complex.

-Arnold Kling, from this substack