“Mostly harmless” is not just the title of the last book in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series; it is also how that universe describes Earth. Lately, that phrase has been feeling less like a joke and more like a precise diagnosis.
Take scientific research first.
I used to make fun of a certain style of contemporary research as adjective-driven research: not research into broad laws, but research narrowed by so many qualifiers that it only applies to a tiny corner of reality. That is partly structural. The big, general patterns have often already been identified, so many professional researchers move into increasingly specialized niches.
A simple example is wastewater treatment. The activated sludge process has been used for urban sewage treatment for well over a century, and it is still among the first options considered when designing new plants. So what have wastewater researchers spent recent decades doing? A great deal of it has been targeted removal of specific pollutants, especially through the introduction of nanomaterials. Much of that falls squarely into the “mostly harmless” category.
In real-world practice, except for certain specialized industrial effluents, the largest volumes are still ordinary domestic sewage. Municipal wastewater plants almost never add an extra treatment stage just to remove one specific pollutant, and they are even less likely to adopt a material that is expensive, chemically reactive, and potentially capable of creating new pollution of its own. Activated sludge has lasted more than a hundred years for a reason: the microorganisms in it can digest almost everything. They can degrade most organic compounds that matter in practice.
Then someone asks: what about the substances microorganisms cannot break down?
Well, if microbes do not degrade them, then in many cases they are close to environmentally inert. If soap cannot remove the tea stain from a coffee cup, do you really need to panic that drinking water from it will poison you? Of course there is an important exception: persistent organic pollutants. Because they resist metabolism and decomposition, they can accumulate in organisms and create chronic toxicity risks. But even here, the epidemiological evidence is often framed in that same qualifier-heavy way: risk appears in a certain age range, in one sex, within a given ethnic category, under a particular BMI range, and so on. To put it bluntly, if you subdivide a population finely enough, even drinking water can end up looking dangerous. This kind of work is fertile ground for Simpson’s paradox; much depends on how you draw the causal diagram and tell the story.
The ecological effects of persistent pollutants are often more direct. Thinner eggshells, skewed sex ratios—those are easier to observe. But ecological harm is less effective at attracting funding than research that can be framed as directly relevant to humans.
That leads to a strange outcome. People in water treatment can publish paper after paper by permuting treatment materials and target pollutants in every possible combination, yet many of those papers are effectively scrap paper the moment they are produced. They will never alter real practice. And still, this kind of work is one of the safest possible career strategies. A novel but useless topic threatens no industry interest, yet it can still make someone an expert in a narrow subfield, increase academic visibility, and keep people employed.
Try instead to work on actual, existing problems—say, nitrogen and phosphorus removal—and the obstacle is often not technology at all, but entrenched interests. Excess nitrogen and phosphorus largely originate upstream in agriculture. To truly constrain them means making enemies of fertilizer producers or farmers. Under those conditions, “mostly harmless” qualifier-based research can remain a long-term equilibrium in academia. It offends no one and absorbs part of the labor force produced by degree inflation.
And degree inflation matters. If a large number of highly credentialed people were forced to confront genuinely hard problems, many would quickly reveal the limits of their real ability. They are not stupid; they can always invent more specialized terminology to display professionalism. Research that is mostly harmless is the safest and most evolutionarily fit form of work in a highly differentiated modern society.
Actually problem-oriented research tends to end in one of three ways. If you are unlucky early on and produce no result, later funding dries up and you quietly leave academia. If you are lucky early on and do get results, academic recognition may still take ten or twenty years, so meanwhile you survive by switching back to mostly harmless work. And if you are lucky both in results and in rapid recognition, but your findings threaten a current interest group, then the group’s proxies within academia suppress you—and you still end up retreating to mostly harmless work just to stay alive.
At the root of this is a tension between academic progress and the sustainability of modern social organization.
As a profession, research groups need continuous input and output to survive. But actual research outcomes often involve long stretches of input with no output at all, unless luck intervenes. Only the latter really tests scientific ability. The former mostly tests whether one can operate under something like a modern corporate system: write proposals, obtain money from the state, recruit students, buy equipment, carry out projects, publish papers, then use those papers as proof of competence in order to write the next proposal and secure the next round of money. It is a closed loop in which success leads to more success.
The business world has its own version: raise angel funding, build a team, launch a product, earn revenue, go public, let investors exit, then raise more capital through equity or debt markets to release new products. Another self-reinforcing loop.
The difference is that academia does not need market validation. Most people cannot read a technical paper, let alone judge whether it matters. That makes it possible for academic circles to protect continuous output even when actual research capacity is weak or intermittent. Hence the persistence of mostly harmless research—what people more bluntly call publication padding.
So it is not quite right to say that mostly harmless research is simply a waste of resources. More often it is a survival strategy for people working inside academia. And perhaps one day a gifted student appears and produces something genuinely useful. If you demand that every project succeed and that every success be important, then you are really asking for luck. Modern society, through its legal and market systems, spends a great deal of effort trying to reduce the role of luck in order to maximize overall stability.
Put harshly, as long as natural resources permit it, modern society could in principle keep operating even with no academic progress at all. There are many unreasonable and disappointing aspects to embedding science within the modern division of labor, but if science were not embedded there, medieval Western Europe already showed what a different arrangement can look like. Maybe ordinary people in that era did not feel the difference all that much—they bought indulgences, we scroll short videos—but for scholars the difference could be whether you merely feel frustrated or literally get burned.
That is enough complaining about academia. The consumer market works in much the same way.
I used to pay close attention to new electronics. Around ten years ago I stopped caring about computers. Five years ago I stopped caring about cameras. Two years ago I even stopped following phones. The reason is simple: the features being marketed now are mostly things that make no meaningful difference to ordinary life. Higher refresh rates, higher resolutions, wider sound ranges—fine, but for many adults there are entire frequency bands they physically cannot hear anymore, so buying some quasi-mystical premium headphones becomes absurd.
In an age of excess performance, manufacturers have two basic strategies. One is to create new scenarios and new needs—for example, building games that demand more computing power. The other is to spend heavily on marketing and construct a sense of brand prestige so that products can keep commanding a premium.
The first strategy tends inevitably toward niche markets. Just compare sales of the Switch and the PS5. The second strategy has done a great deal to produce the emotional, postmodern consumer atmosphere we now live in: constantly stimulating the most sensitive points in consumers so that emotion triggers irrational, impulsive spending. The moment people become rational, they notice that many products are not worth much in themselves. Most of the money goes toward buying security and recognition.
Consumption is the new religion. It promises that, if you pay, you will gain happiness or a better life than other people. Advertising functions as missionary work. Once you accept “brand value” as a ritual practice, you do not even need to wait for the afterlife; you can experience immediate salvation. Feeling low? Buy a handbag. Feeling defeated? Buy a watch. In pain? Drink. Bored? Pay for some immersive entertainment. No traditional religion has ever been this responsive to petition.
But it is worth remembering that this responsiveness is, like religion, largely psychological consolation. When an earthquake hits, what saves you is survival skill—not the handbag, the watch, or the bottle.
Consumer goods are full of gimmicks, but they do have a lower bound: they are mostly harmless.
The clearest case is dietary supplements. They usually do not do much, but they generally will not kill you either. Their advertised benefits often far exceed their intrinsic value, yet their prices are set according to those promised benefits rather than according to what the products materially are. Any product priced according to the buyer’s expectations rather than its substance creates huge arbitrage space, because what is really being sold is not the thing itself but the happiness attached to it. People are always willing to pay dearly for that.
Try selling a plain rock for ten thousand and people might hit you. Say instead that it symbolizes eternal love and suddenly demand exceeds supply. Hardly anyone lacks access to rocks. What they lack is the metaphor.
Many buyers know perfectly well they are being fooled and still buy anyway. It is not always ignorance. Often they are more afraid that others will discover they are unhappy. The more someone loves to show off, the more they rely on the object being shown off to secure external recognition. Naturally, such goods cannot be actively harmful. That description is neutral, not moralizing. Everyone needs recognition from others to some degree; without it, even making a living becomes difficult. But dependence can become ridiculous. I understand dependence on water, food, medicine. Dependence on a mostly harmless stone, to the point where life feels impossible without it, is comic.
Another major category of mostly harmless things is traditional patent medicine. Here the issue is not merely consumer psychology; it is entangled with the structure of the medical industry itself.
Doctors in China earn far less than their American counterparts—more than an order of magnitude less—and while the cost of training also differs, the profession is still often undercompensated relative to peers abroad. In practice, however, doctors have long been subsidized in another way: prescribing drugs.
A decent physician still has a conscience, or at least a line they do not want to cross. Medicines have side effects. This is where traditional patent medicines become useful. On one hand, in many of these products the effective ingredients are actually modern pharmaceutical compounds mixed in. On the other hand, many are themselves mostly harmless, and their efficacy is difficult to verify cleanly. That makes them ideal for prescription: the doctor can feel morally acceptable about writing them, avoid more obviously improper conduct such as direct bribery, and still indirectly raise income, often through departmental commissions.
If these medicines were suddenly removed, a very large share of physicians in public hospitals would probably leave for other careers, not to mention the pharmaceutical companies and growers connected to them. The issue is easily framed as a conflict between Chinese and Western medicine, but underneath that rhetoric lies a conflict of interests. If physicians’ income were not tied to drugs, discussion would probably become much more rational and evidence-based.
To be fair, mostly harmless does not mean completely useless. Even a placebo can improve immunity through psychological pathways. Human beings are naturally instrumental; we assign value to objects almost automatically. Once we possess something, we often do feel satisfaction. I get that feeling every time I buy books. Whether I actually read them afterward is another matter.
Mostly harmless things are not limited to products. They also exist as abstract rules.
In many institutions, administrative departments are arguably optional, though the people in them obviously do not think so. To justify their existence, they generate recurring meetings, bureaucratic procedures, and administrative tasks that make everyone appear busy. Are these meetings useful? Not really. Are they harmful? Not in any spectacular sense. But anyone who has attended routine meetings knows that apart from letting middle management count heads and see who arrived late, they rarely produce much value.
If your work requires solitary thought or creativity, such meetings are machines for strangling inspiration. Being called away at a critical moment to discuss task allocation often becomes the single biggest obstacle to finishing the task.
Many positions exist not because the work is indispensable, but because a department head wants more people in order to expand personal power. A larger staff can make a unit hard to cut, and the enlarged unit then receives more resources. In many departments, real efficiency depends on only a small number of people; the others mainly need to drift along without disrupting things. The worst scenario is when the people who should be quietly coasting suddenly decide they need to make their voices heard. At that point the organization can tumble into the abyss of bureaucracy.
Large institutions usually hire redundantly whenever resources allow, because redundancy stabilizes operations. Several people can vanish at the same time during holidays and nothing changes. Those extra employees belong to the mostly harmless category. In a large organization, positions select people more than people select positions, so role definition matters. Small organizations are not morally superior; they just do not have the resources for such overstaffing, so one person often does the work of two.
The spread of the mostly harmless in modern society is close to inevitable. Once a system takes shape, much of its effort turns toward preserving itself.
Still, mostly harmless things are not necessarily meaningless. As nonessential goods for survival, they can still have social function. Without mostly harmless research projects, many labs might not survive long enough to produce results on major scientific problems. Without the excess profits that attract producers into making mostly harmless consumer goods, mobility between social strata might shrink even further and indirectly threaten the system. Without mostly harmless administrative departments acting as buffers, many employees would find it much harder to exploit loopholes, coast a little, and cultivate whatever interesting hobbies keep them sane.
I am not a devotee of pure progress. In my view, there is no need to worship efficiency, dreams, or task completion as absolute values. But neither do I feel absolute hostility toward things that are mostly harmless.
After all, they are mostly harmless.