People Are Worried About Index Funds

Some things—people, companies, decisions, institutions, societal structures, whatever—have bad consequences because they are bad. Instead of making the bad decision, you should just make a better one. Other things have bad consequences because they are big and complicated and require difficult tradeoffs; you have to live with the bad consequences to get other good consequences, though perhaps you could make a different decision to get the same, or different, good consequences with fewer, or different, bad ones.

And then there are things that have bad consequences because they are somehow isomorphic to the world; they have bad consequences because they have all the consequences; they contain a version of everything that exists. So it misses the point to criticize them for the bad stuff. “Everything you hate about The Internet is actually everything you hate about people,” says Balk’s First Law, the clearest example of this sort of thing: The internet is a structuring and indexing and reflection of the world, and so if the world contains horror and misery and evil and ignorance then so will the internet.