Disaction Bias: When Doing Nothing Causes Disaster

Sometimes inaction gets you into really bad trouble

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.

-Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1932 presidential campaign

In prior posts, I’ve attempted to coin the verb “tuskegee” to describe the disastrous decision to withhold medicine from a person who needs it. Unfortunately, the word tuskegee turns out to be about as popular at parties as a turd in the punchbowl. It lands in people’s minds solely as a screech of raaaacism[clutch pearls], and it takes a lot of effort to explain why the Tuskegee Study is also a story about physicians blithely refusing to treat a deadly disease.

Another problem with the verb tuskegee is that it’s not really broad enough. Withholding medicine is only one of a wide range of scenarios where refusing to take action could get somebody killed. It would be strange to call this classic Don’t Look Up scene, in which a president refuses to take action to avert a disaster, “tuskegeeistic” - even though it kind of is:

Proposal

The central claim of this article is that there is a general human mental bias toward inaction, even when inaction obviously isn’t the best available option. This bias makes it harder for individuals and institutions to weigh the risks and benefits of various possible actions against the risk that an unaddressed status quo will lead to disaster.

Neologism

In the magic-suffused world of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea novels, knowing the secret “true name” of a thing grants a wizard the power to command the thing. LeGuin is playing with the idea that having a precise term for something helps you recognize, understand, and ultimately control its deeper nature. Having a word for situations where inaction causes a preventable disaster might give us more power over the problem.

English has a rich vocabulary for regrettable actions. For example, a debacle is what happens when somebody takes actions that precipitate an embarrassing fiasco they should have seen coming. Napoleon’s attempt to break the battle line at Waterloo was a classic debacle. In contrast, we don’t have succinct terms for describing undesirable outcomes that happen because somebody failed to take sensible action. I therefore propose:

Dis•action - when refusal to take action in the face of an identifiable risk leads to predictably undesirable consequences

The neologism unites the root word dis- (“not” or “separated from”) with action. Alternatively, it could be inferred as a portmanteau of “dis-inaction,” where dis- denotes “ill” (as in the familiar word disaster, which derives from “ill-starred”).

In some situations, inaction might obviously be the wisest available bet. An antonym for disaction could be “euaction” - a portmanteau of eu- (“well” or “good”) and inaction.

In The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman defines “folly” as policies pursued by governments that run against their own self‑interest, where other feasible courses were available and known, and where contemporaries recognized and warned that the chosen course of action was counterproductive. We’re essentially proposing a special sub-category of Tuchman’s “folly,” in which bias against the perception of a looming disaction ends in disaster.

Terms that can help illuminate how disaction bias creeps up on us

Omission bias. Psychological experiments have shown that people tend to judge harmful actions more harshly than equally harmful omissions of action. Individuals and, in particular, bureaucracies are intuitively aware of omission bias - so inaction tends to be judged as reputationally “safer” than any given action, even in cases where inaction obviously is not the safest choice.

Risk-inflation. Inflating perceived risks for various actions while downplaying the risks of doing nothing. The classic example here is Golden Rice - a GMO rice strain that produces beta carotene (a harmless dimer of vitamin A). Entities like Greenpeace hysterically whipped up the imaginary risks of Frankenstein environmental disasters while discounting the benefits of treating vitamin A deficiency in low-income countries. Our collective disaction on Golden Rice killed more kids than the Nazis.

Futility bias. There’s a human mental bug where the likelihood of an action actually working is inappropriately discounted. Futility bias tilts the scales toward inaction. An example of this bias is NASA’s abject failure to try to do DNA deep-sequencing samples from Mars and the asteroid Bennu.

Vetocracy. The classic example here is the liberum veto of the 18th century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The idea was that since all the noblemen in Parliament were equal, they should all have an equal right to object and suspend lawmaking. Pretty soon, Russia figured out that all they had to do was bribe one dirtbag and the Polish Parliament would be left lying flat on its back doing nothing. Poland was carved up and dissolved at the end of the 18th century.

Status display. Bold proposals by underlings are rejected because they are seen as a disrespectful challenge to authority. This mechanism typically employs credentialism and appeal to authority fallacy. It often intersects with failures of imagination.

Failure of imagination. I’ve been drifting in and out of obsession with the third interstellar object, Atlas. Its strange behaviors demand the use of a full range of space telescopes, but because NASA sees speculation as taboo they’ve decided not to use some of the telescopes that could rule out some of the more exotic hypotheses independent scientists have been dreaming up on Medium. And no, I’m not talking about aliens. My hypothesis for the past four months has been that Atlas might have a magnetic field and a thin oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. The atmosphere can be ruled out with far-ultraviolet imaging. The failure of imagination at NASA means they’re disactively still not using any of the far-UV telescopes.

Decorousness. Respect for norms and taboos - and a reluctance to rock the boat. Merrick Garland, the worst law enforcement attorney in human history, is the poster child for this insidious greased skid toward disaction.

Laziness. There’s sometimes an element of laziness underlying futility bias, but at a general overview level I don’t think being lazy is usually a direct factor underlying the folly of disaction. Disasters that arise from laziness are basically just dereliction of duty - we already have plenty of existing words for that type of thing.

Future posts

My brother Andrew’s critique of an early draft of this post was that it seemed like I was arbitrarily lumping together all the different topics that are currently annoying me. There’s a grain of truth in this critique, but I would reframe it more charitably as a sudden realization that there’s a hidden thread tying together many of the ideas I’m currently wrestling with. Now that I have a word for the phenomenon, I’m seeing it all over the place. In bullet points:

•I’ve taken to calling the bioethics committees at work the disactionista brigade. But only after my husband, Chris Tharrington, scolded me for calling them disactionazis.

•I’m going to hand off future posts covering disactive episodes in history to my history-nerd husband.

•I’m interested in ecology and the environment (even though I don’t post about it much), and it has been dawning on me that whole subject area is awash in disactional thinking.

•The US housing market is a disactionist disaster area. The political faction that most desperately needs this neologism is the Abundance crowd. Government-enforced disaction is the exact thing they’re annoyed by.

Stay tuned!

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Song of the day: Sometimes disaction stems from the fear that you’re not equipped to take the needed action. Maybe “cowardice” belongs on the disaction-associated terminology list.