Boiling Frog

In the first section of this chapter, we warned about the tyranny of small decisions, where a series of isolated and seemingly good decisions can nevertheless add up to a bad outcome. There is a broader class of unintended consequences to similarly watch out for, which also involve making seemingly good short-term decisions that can still add up to a bad outcome in the long term. The mental model often used to describe this class of unintended consequences is called the boiling frog: Suppose a frog jumps into a pot of cold water. Slowly the heat is turned up and up and up, eventually boiling the frog to death.