Skipping to the Bad Part
When the plan delivers the thing it was supposed to prevent
Some strategies are built so their own mechanism produces the outcome they were meant to prevent, and a comforting label hides it. That label is a revealed priority: stopping the failure was never the real goal.
The “herd immunity strategy” was mass infection under a protective name. Its stated goal was to stop illness and death, while its mechanism was to let everybody get sick until enough people became immune. The outcome it claimed to prevent was the first step of the plan.
Calling it herd immunity rather than mass infection named the hoped-for destination and hid the road. I have started calling this move skipping to the bad part.
How the move works
Begin with a goal to prevent X and some imperfect protection against it. The protection leaks, can be beaten and has known failure modes. Instead of asking how leaky it is and what the alternatives cost, somebody redesigns the plan so that producing X becomes a load-bearing step. The old failure is now a deliverable.
The plan keeps the vocabulary of prevention, which lets it look protective while operating as surrender.
This goes beyond the familiar nirvana fallacy. Refusing a seatbelt because it cannot protect you perfectly, or a mask because it leaks, leaves you unprotected but builds no machinery for the harm. Skipping to the bad part is active: the plan remains in place and its own mechanism produces the failure, while the title continues to promise the happy outcome.
The escape hatch into the same room
A current example comes from serious writing on how middle powers such as the UK, Europe, Japan and Korea might avoid being steamrolled after one country reaches superintelligence first. One proposal argues that if the US cuts a country off from frontier AI, China will be the only remaining game, so those relationships should be built now as a plan B.
The proposed protection is against domination by whoever controls superintelligence. Yet the backup is an alliance with the other country racing to control it. Under the proposal’s own assumptions, where the winner takes all and has no incentive to give smaller states a fair deal, a Chinese victory ends their autonomy in the same way as a dominant US. The escape hatch opens into the same room.
It looks protective only after the goal has quietly narrowed from “avoid domination” to “avoid domination by the US.” Restore the wider goal and the plan’s mechanism is visibly producing what it was meant to prevent. This narrowing is the general tell.
The proposal does frame China as leverage that would never really be used, a bluff for extracting a better deal from the US. A bluff only has force if you would pull it, though, and doing so enters the bad part. The leverage is as real as the willingness to lose.
The label reveals the priority
The label earns this pattern a place on a blog about revealed priorities. “Herd immunity strategy” allowed its advocates to skip expensive and unpopular work such as lockdowns, capacity building and direct intervention while retaining the appearance of a plan. Protecting people was the stated priority; protecting the appearance of action at the lowest possible cost was the revealed one.
The same split appears when a company ships anonymisation it knows is reversible and calls the dataset “anonymised.” Privacy is the stated priority, while shipping the data with plausible deniability is the revealed one. A journal keeps calling single-blind review “blind” when reviewers can already identify the authors because impartiality is the stated priority and changing nothing is the revealed one.
The euphemism marks the seam between them. A comforting name on the step that constitutes the failure tells you to look past the label and read the mechanism.
Read what the plan produces
When a strategy is named after its happy ending, ask what it actually produces under the goal you genuinely hold. If its mechanism manufactures the outcome it was sold as preventing, the protection has not merely fallen short. Somebody has chosen to skip to the bad part and hopes the title will stop you reading the fine print.