Accidental harm is harm resulting from unforeseen effects of attempts to do good.
Further reading
Aird, Michael (2020) Information hazards and downside risks, LessWrong, February 18.
Dalton, Max & Jonas Volmer (2018) How to avoid accidentally having a negative impact with your project, Effective Altruism Global, October 27.
Hilton, Samuel (2019) Managing risk in the EA policy space, Effective Altruism Forum, December 9.
Kokotajlo, Daniel & Alexandra Oprea (2020) Counterproductive altruism: The other heavy tail, Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 34, pp. 134–163.
Wiblin, Robert & Howie Lempel (2018) Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them, 80,000 Hours, October 16.
Wikipedia (2002) Unintended consequences, Wikipedia, October 1 (updated 20 April 2021).
See in particular, “Unexpected drawbacks” and “Perverse results”, not “Unintended benefits”.
Related entries
differential progress | information hazard | spillover effects | unilateralist’s curse
I added a Further reading section containing the things I’d earlier collected in a shortform: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EMKf4Gyee7BsY2RP8/michaela-s-shortform?commentId=GLJdSeFpLQhg6p8cK
But:
We haven’t yet decided whether the EA Wiki should have Further reading sections, or just put all of that in a Bibliography, or do something else
I didn’t take the time to format these properly
The order I used is arbitrary
So the idea is that this is a useful starting point that can be adjusted later.
Thanks. Don’t worry about formatting.