And, critically, you potentially need to ignore the signal of "things getting worse". Otherwise you might creature a vicious cycle of more corrective action -> more things getting worse (at first) -> even more corrective action, until your system crashes and you never got into the phase where most of the desired result of the corrective action materialized.

And a second important point: You mustn't ever get into a state where the "things getting worse at first" already pushes you over a red line (see the example of the plane that loses even more altitude before it rises again. If you hit the ground in between you don't care that you theoretically would have risen later on).

That's only half of the story. The second half of the story is "if the getting worse temporarily cancels out the getting better, stop trying to correct, or you're going to crash!"

I think "when things get worse we tend to double down on what caused things to get worse, until everything around us crash and burn" would be more accurate, given the current state of affairs.

To me, that immediately sounds like someone making excuses for their side and the midterm elections. I don’t care how much math there is.

It really all depends on how low to the ground you are when things begin to get worse.

For example, a virus that takes 10 IQ points off people who've been infected with it might make China more apt to consume Disney movies, while it might plow America straight into the ground.