help me find or coin a general term for the error of ~"throwing the baby out with the bathwater" 🌊👶💦 except: 🤏 short verb (like "goodharting" or "one-boxing") 💡 needs little-to-no explanation (not "chesterton's fence") 🥼 due to hubris/"I know better", not a lapse (eg "stopped pounding the manioc") 🤨 plausible (did the baby/bathwater thing ever actually happen? ...looks fictional. in any case we have drains now) basically, a word for "making the error that proper conservativism mostly avoids" or put another way "removing something load-bearing in an attempt to remove something annoying" I bet we can coin something if we find a memorable incident with a distinct word, then verb it (like "thalidomiding" or "CFCing" although they're connotationally slightly off. "introducing cane toads to australia" is too long and too localized but is connotationally quite good) proposals?
Coining a short verb for throwing out the baby with the bathwater
11 tweets · August 2023 · 74 likes · 2 retweets · read on Twitter
"gasledding" would be good if it didn't sound like "gaslighting" 😅 lead in gasoline wasn't an accident—it gave a HUGE boost to engine performance—but alas, neurotoxicity oh, the advantage of "baby-bathwater" is it highlights that you hurt *yourself*, not just externalities
this seems basically right actually! but hmm... I don't feel inclined to use it in the situation I was originally looking for this word for, so something still off about it. meddling kinda suggests self-other, whereas this thing can be a self-own? hmm twitter.com/HephaistosF/st…
emphasis on insight moment here is a good prompt makes me think of King Midas, or other myths. Gift of the Magi is adjacent. okay so in one subtype of this, an attempt to take advantage of a situation destroys the situation, leading to ruin
ahh I feel like there's a phrase here from medicine / iatrogenic harm... ah no I'm thinking of "cutting off the nose to spite the face." that doesn't have the right connotation at all but "the cure is worse than the disease" is very close, though not the verb I'm looking for
ah yeah "playing god" is very very close (and definitely appropriate to eg the cane toad situation) tho it lacks concreteness and also doesn't capture how mundane these errors can feel while making them twitter.com/HephaistosF/st…
hmmm this emphasis on illusory control might suggest a term something like "pseudocontrolling"... confolling trollconning (lol trollcon sounds like a weird event) confailing mucontrolling ...none of these are accessible at all ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/wea…
ahhh hmm this whole thing is a bit related to Darwin awards. it's like, somebody does something that is a costly evolutionary dead end, that COULD have been anticipated in advance? although that post is talking in part about preference falsification as source of unpredictability
huh, how about "shitstoppering"? with the connotation of "there was something you didn't like (💩) so you thought you would plug up the apparent source of the problem (🕳️)!" what could go wrong!?
wait actually "whatcouldgowronging" is not the worst idea for a term here. or "holdmybeering" "those people who put lead in gasoline were totally whatcouldgowronging" "people trying to change social norms abruptly and punish those who do the old ones are whatcouldgowronging"
"decautionary principle" "postcautionary principle" hmm twitter.com/chaosprime/sta…