The “law of unintended consequences,” isn’t a statute whose violation carries a stiff fine, although some managers behave as if it’s just such a regulation.

When it comes to this so-called law, intellectual laziness imposes a double whammy. The first is that people hear the phrase and immediately assume they understand what’s behind it, without any actual research or thinking. The second is that most unintended consequences are the result of taking action without much actual research or thinking.

Someone once computed the computations for the perfect game of chess. He used the theoretical minimum time and energy required to perform a computation, and a reasonable estimate of the number of possible different permutations of chess moves (the number is astronomical but finite). He concluded that had someone built a computer with all the mass and energy of the universe, not enough time has passed yet since the big bang to have computed the perfect chess game.

Most figure the law of unintended consequences refers to this sort of situation, where the intrinsic complexity of most real-world physical and social systems makes predicting the outcomes of even simple actions impossible. And so, goes this line of thinking, there’s really no point in trying. Just do what you want to do and don’t worry about it.

It’s an excuse. Most consequences, while unintended, are actually quite easy to predict. In fact, they usually were predicted, only nobody wanted to listen to the inconvenient predictions.

An example from my sordid past: About 15 years ago, a couple of PC-based COBOL compilers appeared. They weren’t cheap, nor were the high-end PCs required to run them.

Another manager decided they were just the ticket for offloading the mainframe during the application development process. When I asked whether the product shipped with a CICS emulator, VSAM emulator, and emulators for the other bits and pieces of our mainframe environment needed for a program to actually do anything, I got hand-waving in response.

Sadly, at the time I lacked the character, manners and political judgment to avoid saying I-told-you-so when the workstations turned out to be useless. The manager, on the other hand, waved off the fiasco by chalking it up to something we couldn’t have foreseen without giving it a try. Waving, it appeared, was his core competency.

It turns out that the law of intended consequences never did mean what most people think it means. The American sociologist Robert Merton explored the subject in depth back in 1936 (I’m relying on Rob Norton’s excellent synopsis in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Merton’s analysis recognized five causes of unintended consequences. They are (I’m paraphrasing): Bad logic, simple ignorance, willful ignorance, basic values, and self-preventing prophesy.

The definition of bad logic is self-evident, as is the connection between it and unintended consequences. The rest call for explanation.

The difference between willful ignorance and simple ignorance is that willful ignorance refers to the deliberate wearing of conceptual blinders, ignoring whatever evidence and lines of reasoning don’t lead to the desired conclusion. Those who are simply ignorant know little or no evidence of any kind.

“Basic values” is akin to what ethicists call deontological thinking. It means applying your values to the action itself, rather than its consequences — so of course the consequences will be unintended. Merton took this a step further, reflecting on situations where applying values leads to their violation. He used the example of “… the Protestant ethic of hard work and asceticism.” Since this results in the accumulation of wealth, it ends up leading to its own abandonment.

And finally, there’s the one I don’t think fits: self-preventing prophesy. The whole purpose of forecasting disaster — whether the forecast was Bob Metcalfe’s prediction of the Internet’s collapse or climate scientists’ warnings of global warming — is to prevent the problem’s occurrence. Calling the results unintended would seem to miss the point.

Which leads, at last, to you. You have two choices. You can do your best to think things through. Or you can rely on the chess-game definition of the “law” and use it as an excuse. But that’s all it is, because chess players don’t talk about the law of unintended consequences. They talk about establishing strong positions, and about thinking further ahead than their opponents.

It’s like this: Most unintended consequences are the result of conscious decisions — to not think, to not consider evidence, or both. It isn’t actually a paradox, although it sounds like one: The consequences might be unintentional, but their cause is deliberate.

When James Frey’s “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, turned out to be more fiction than autobiography, many of those who loved the book defended it, saying that within the lies was a larger truth.

Well, no. “Truth” suggests trustworthy meaning. If the best evidence an author can muster in support of that meaning is falsehood, it doesn’t bode well for the truthiness of the conclusions.

Intestinal decision-making is waxing; reliance on evidence and logic is waning. The cause of reason isn’t helped by those who fake or stretch the evidence. There’s new evidence, as if any was needed, that evidence-stretching is pervasive.

The Register (www.theregister.co.uk) — one of my favorite IT publications — tabulated the many cost-of-thus-and-such calculations that frequently substitute for actual news in the popular press and trade publications. You know the type: “The cost of employee personal use of the Internet is costing industry $178 billion dollars a year in lost productivity.”

You’ll find the full report here, including links to the sources of the various nonsensical numbers (the $178 billion estimate comes, unsurprisingly, from a seller of web filtering software). According to The Register, the total cost of such money wasters, added to a few inarguable fixed, unavoidable expenses, totals $7.39 trillion annually — $1.7 trillion more than the total amount of cash circulating in the world.

Back in the dot-com era I made a similar point about industry growth projections (“Market forecast bunkum,” September 25, 2000) — that for all the forecasts to be accurate, the economy would have to grow several orders of magnitude faster than the world had ever seen. Those ludicrous forecasts and the inflated damage estimates tabulated by The Register have the same root cause: “Experts” willing to sell whatever opinion their customers want.

In the dot-com era, their customers wanted venture capital. To get it they needed promises of extraordinary growth. Now, their customers are selling solutions to risk. They need the threat of inconceivable levels of damage to justify the price of whatever cure they’re peddling.

Before 1970 and Earth Day, manufacturers had the legal right to dump just about any industrial waste just about anywhere they wanted to. Having the legal right, though, didn’t create an obligation.

And so it is today: Pundits for hire have the legal right to pollute the meme pool. They aren’t obliged to do that either. But so long as someone is willing to buy, you can be sure someone will come along willing to sell, whether the product is an inflated growth estimate, inflated risk estimate, or illegal recreational pharmaceutical.

With all of the above in mind, here’s a plea from this very small soapbox to all of the advocates, pundits, self-styled experts, and bloggers (yes, I know — I said the same thing twice) who figure any assertion that bolsters their opinion qualifies as a fact, and all distortions that help their side win are justified: Stop! Please. Right now. Every fiction you present as a fact creates skepticism about all of the evidence anyone presents about anything. Every increase in skepticism about all evidence creates more justification for trusting intuition over reason.

Never mind. The last paragraph was a waste of space. Asking people like this to exercise self-restraint is like asking drug-dealers to stop trying to get kids high. The only way we can turn off the spigot is to curtail demand (for exaggerated financial estimates — form your own opinion about the war on drugs).

You have a part to play.

If you engage the services of pundits, research firms, or other experts for hire, consider any spin-mongering, on any topic, during the past five years to be a deal-breaker. Other evidence of low intellectual integrity — like telling clients what they want to hear for a fee — should be deal-breakers as well.

This should, of course, be business as usual. Why would you want to pay big bucks for untrustworthy information? The good news is that while you’re personally benefiting, you’ll also be performing a public service — helping to stem the tide of intellectual relativism.

That’s a big deal. After all, according to estimates prepared by the Froschbosch Institute, intellectual relativism is currently costing world industry $1.3 trillion in bad decisions and unnecessary due diligence every year — and they wouldn’t lie, would they?