The ratchet problem: on asymmetric risk

There’s a pattern I keep noticing.

Losing weight is hard. Gaining it is easy. An exercise injury happens in a moment; recovery can take months. Building a savings cushion takes months of discipline. Spending it can happen in a weekend. Earning someone’s trust is slow and cumulative. You can lose it in a single sentence. Changing your mind about something you’ve believed for years (really changing it, not just updating a surface position) is one of the hardest things a person can do. Arriving at that belief in the first place probably didn’t feel effortful at all.

This type of structural asymmetry is everywhere. And if you want to design resilient systems, you are wise to anticipate it.

There’s a concept in engineering called a ratchet, a mechanism that allows motion in one direction and resists it in the other. The cost to advance is low. The cost to reverse is high. And the resistance isn’t always proportional to how far you’ve gone. Sometimes a single click is nearly impossible to undo.

Economists have a related idea: path dependency. The order of events matters as much as the sum. Ten good days followed by one catastrophic one isn’t equivalent to a flat average, because the catastrophic day may reset or compound in ways the arithmetic doesn’t capture. A single bad night of eating adds calories, and it can also trigger a guilt spiral that extends the damage for days. The ratchet clicks, and then the response to the click becomes a second-order ratchet.

Belief works the same way, more subtly. When we hold a position publicly, defend it in conversation, build identity around it, signal tribal membership with it, we raise the cost of reversal. Each defense is another click. At some point the ratchet starts functioning as a kind of sunk cost fallacy: the prior investment in the belief becomes the reason to keep believing it, independent of whether the belief still holds up. By then, changing your mind is as much a social and psychological act as an intellectual one. The people most invested in a belief are often the last to update it, not because they’re less intelligent, but because the ratchet has more clicks to undo.

The same pattern shows up constantly in engineering management, often with higher stakes because the feedback loops are slower and the damage is less visible.

Trust and psychological safety accumulate through dozens of small interactions and can be set back significantly by a single public misstep. The second-order ratchet does real damage here: teams that stop surfacing problems don’t announce it, they just stop, and you lose the signal before you know it’s gone.

Technical debt is almost a textbook ratchet. Shortcuts taken under pressure are easy to make and nearly impossible to reverse once the code becomes load-bearing, and the sunk cost dimension shows up when teams defend architectural decisions simply because so much has been built on top of them.

Hiring has a brutal asymmetry too. A bad hire can take six to eighteen months to fully recognize and resolve, and the damage to team dynamics compounds the whole time. Teams often adjust around a low performer rather than address it, normalizing the drag until it becomes the baseline.

There’s a related idea called ergodicity. The average outcome across a population doesn’t tell you what happens to a single person over time. One catastrophic event (a bankruptcy, say, or a broken relationship) can permanently alter your trajectory in a way that averages obscure. You can’t diversify across your own life the way a portfolio can diversify across assets. You live sequentially, and some losses don’t compound back.

I’m not sure there’s a clean solution to any of this. But you can think about it from two directions at once.

The first is minimizing the damage of the rare bad event. I’m skeptical that preventing it is really the goal, or even possible at scale. A production incident is more survivable if the system was designed to limit blast radius before it happened. The impulsive thing said in an argument lands softer on a base of trust, and the unexpected home repair hurts less with a buffer built in. You can’t eliminate the catastrophic click, but you can sometimes cap how far it travels. The response to the bad event may matter even more. A quick, undramatic return to baseline, where the bad day counts as noise, is a skill, and probably an underrated one. This is part of what makes tools like cognitive/dialectical behavioral therapy (CBT/DBT) useful. They’re essentially frameworks for interrupting second-order ratchets, for catching the narrative before it clicks further than the event warranted. It’s also why I’ve come to prefer tools that show me trends over time rather than daily verdicts, since they make it harder to catastrophize a single bad data point into a reason to abandon the whole project. (I’m looking at you, MacroFactor.)

But the ratchet runs both ways; it’s neutral. The same mechanism that makes bad outcomes sticky can make good ones sticky too, if you can find the right ones.

The second direction is almost the inverse: finding the ratchets that run the right way and leaning into them deliberately. Small consistent actions that are individually trivial but hard to reverse. In the book Atomic Habits, James Clear calls these identity votes. Each small action is a vote for the kind of person you’re becoming, and at some point the accumulated votes shift the underlying identity. Showing up regularly, to a workout or a relationship or a practice, eventually changes the terrain. The behavior becomes part of who you are, which makes the next instance easier. It clicks forward just as stubbornly as it clicks back.

The asymmetry doesn’t disappear. But maybe the move is to quit trying equally hard to prevent bad events and create good ones, and play to the structure. Absorb the rare catastrophe as cheaply as possible. Let the small consistent wins accumulate interest.