Based on a snippet of a conversation in a podcast I had been listening to this morning, I was thinking today about predictions based on cause and effect. Causes and effects are relatively easy to discern. What is really difficult is understanding the intensity of the effect.  

I have been hearing people sound the alarm on existential crises my entire life, yet here we still are.  
The specific example that came up was the warning sounded over mass vaccinations in the middle of a pandemic- particularly if those vaccines were in two parts. The thinking was that by only partially vaccinating in the first shot, an evolutionary effect would be triggered whereby the virus would have far more opportunity for figuring out ways around the immunological response before the second shot a month later. In sum, vaccinating this way would provide the virus with a tremendous opportunity to evolve around the vaccines, and render them useless.

THAT thinking is solid. We could understand that this scenario would cause an effect. The intensity of the effect in the real world was the unknown, precisely because the system those effects play out in is far more complex than anyone can possibly understand. Variants did arise, but perhaps not at the level which was expected. And of course, there is also the tendency on those trying to sound the alarm to state strong versions… if not worst-case scenarios… of the possibilities, especially if their warnings are being largely ignored. They are trying to get people’s attention, and in a paradigm of incessant competition for your attention, this is probably only done through hyperbole.

This got me to thinking about the complexity of the system, and how, almost ALL the time, effects turn out to be far less than we imagine. If I were to take an uneducated guess, I might hypothesize that, particularly in large-scale systems, the effects would be cast over a vast array of smaller sub-systems. Each of those would respond to mitigate the effects on its particular domain. In other words, there are just too many complex layers and too many forces acting to neutralize the effects, for worst-case scenarios to come true.  

This is probably why causes rarely have devastating effects.