“No good deed ever goes unpunished.”

Sometimes when you try to do something good or helpful, it can backfire and you end up in trouble or face negative consequences, sadly, even when you have the best intentions.

This can happen even when you are trying to be kind or helpful towards those closest to us, such as our parents. It’s an unfortunate reality that good deeds don’t always result in positive outcomes.

Nobel prize–winner and game theory pioneer Reinhard Selten observed that people work diligently to be rational ex post. That is, we commonly look back at how a situation played out to try and understand how a better outcome might have been achieved. This contrasts with a game theory approach in which the goal is to develop a strategy that will lead to that better outcome a priori.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 51,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 19 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.