No Good Options

Description.

Components.

Related Engine Processes.

Further reading.

• all options (actions) unpleasant. Even though they may help with the problem, they will have bad side-effects. Example: diverting money from welfare to restrict global warming. Example: a person accepting reduced income (or a business accepting reduced profit) for the benefit of the environment: conflict of interest (link to priorities qv).
• Example (for Collapse-Less component?): Aon Center building. Options were to either pay $80m to fix the problem or risk having marble slabs drop from the building onto people below.
• Can result in doing nothing, or refusing to change current actions (eg, pursuing personal quality of life).
• trolley problem assesses whether people would take one unpleasant action for the greater good.
• If in doubt (probability qv, uncertainty qv), do nothing.
• If we rule out all options, none remains.
• Picking the best of a bunch of bad options may be better than not picking any at all (unless do-nothing happens to be best).
• We can’t rule out an option a soon as we decide we don’t like it. We may need to choose between the best of a bad lot. Worse, if adaptation might be required, a previously-rejected option may need to be reconsidered. Therefore, no option can ever be totally discarded. The exception might be if implementing the option would be worse than any possible outcome from the problem.
• More than one thinking trap may encourage do-nothing. Should there be a common discussion of do-nothing on its own page? do-nothing is not a trap in its own right; it’s the default (null) decision and action.
• A decision involves selecting zero or more actions. Therefore, inaction is a decision. Choosing not to decide is equivalent to deciding on inaction. Doing nothing gives us the feeling that we’re not responsible for the outcome because we didn’t do anything wrong (trolley problem: we didn’t do anything wrong because we didn’t do anything at all). 
  Doing nothing is a decision, even if it is not an action. As such, we're still responsible for any consequences. Don’t put the brakes on because there’s a chance that they might catch fire; it’s better to crash into the tree. Not making a decision (ie, taking no action) is equivalent to deciding to do nothing (ie, accepting the default outcome). 'Deciding not to decide' is a meta-decision, but it doesn't freeze time and avoid all consequences — except in the special case that the do-nothing option is consequence-free.
• 'Your honour, it isn't my fault that my car ran into that crowd. I didn't have my hands on the steering wheel.' Humanity is in the car and is flooring the accelerator while studiously avoiding any interaction with the steering wheel. Most of us aren't even looking out the windscreen; we're distracted by more trivial pursuits. [too cynical]
• Doing nothing doesn’t mean that everything will stay the same. When faced with a changing situation (eg, GW), doing nothing can allow the problem to get worse.[BW] Doing nothing may seem more attractive with slow change (time-scope qv) because familiarity-bias qv causes us to only perceive the short-term change, which may be negligible and overshadowed by transients.
• If doing nothing (or delaying action) exacerbates the problem, the problem may disproportionately affects people who are more vulnerable to the problem (eg, poor, elderly, weak). COVID, conflict, GW. If we want a more equitable distribution of adverse consequences, we may need to take action. This is exacerbated because those most able to effect change (rich, not old, healthy) will be less affected by the problem. Link to familiarity-bias qv, priorities qv.
• 'soft landing' vs 'hard landing' (when you don't want to land at all).
• 'buying time' may be a valid interim strategy: an action that delays or slows the problem while a better solution can be found and implemented. COVID face masks buying time for inoculation? How to represent such actions in final thinking engine? Compound and interim actions may be required. Interim actions should not be confused with sustainable actions: having applied a band-aid, don't put off the surgery indefinitely.
• cf culture qv which can influence whether an option is acceptable (eg, death penalty?). Non-solutions (eg, killing two billion people) might solve the problem at hand, but create others and won't be implemented; cf optimisation qv.
• cf demoralising qv
• Rename to no-ideal-options or bad-side-effects?
• Example: very sick pet: don't want it to suffer but don't want to kill it.