Intervention Bias: When to Step in and When To Leave Things Alone
Nassim Taleb, author of many books—The Black Swan, Fooled By Randomness, and The Bed of Procrustes— also wrote a book on fragility called Antifragile (antifragile defined).
One of the core ideas of Antifragile is around our tendency to intervene in situations regardless of whether that benefit is a net positive. There is a term for this, iatrogenics. Why do we do this? I can think of three good reasons: 1) we struggle to think in systems, 2) we believe that systems would benefit from our intervention and guidance, and 3) we believe that we know how to fix things to make them better.
The first reason is that we are unable to think in terms of second, third, and nth order consequences. More importantly, we are unaware that we need to. The second reason is that we see systems operating and see a flaw in the system that we could do better. Usually, it’s minor. This combines with the third reason, which is we think we are the very person that needs to fix the system.
(via Intervention Bias: When to Step in and When To Leave Things Alone)