That's one issue, but another issue is how accurately we can estimate the counterfactual outcomes. In the case you described, where some up-front investment can reduce costs later on, the accuracy of the estimate of the counterfactual is usually fairly good. But when we talk about society-wide or planet-wide outcomes, our accuracy is much worse. Even in many cases where it seems fairly obvious that an up front intervention mitigated significant harm, we really don't know that with a very high level of confidence. There are just too many uncontrolled and unmeasured variables.
You've just described most paradoxes. From the definition of "paradox":
> a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true.
Using "paradox" for something like this concept though is along the lines of also using it for the phenomenon of people appearing to vote against their self-interest. They keep doing it, we don't understand why - it might be that they're stupid, it might be that we don't understand enough of their perspective, but it just doesn't strike me as a paradox. Not unless every phenomenon we don't understand is also a paradox. Are software bugs paradoxes?
It is tempting to attribute this to a technical/non-technical difference (similar to fallacy, which in non-technical discussion has been expanded to basically include almost any bad argument). But somehow the Birthday "Paradox" has managed to stick in probability.
Some of the earliest paradoxes are Zeno's, and they were referred to by that term at the time. For example the paradox that an object that moves towards a point must first cover half the distance, and then half the remaining distance, then half of the remainder, etc. Since this is an infinite number of steps, Zeno playfully argued that motion is impossible. There's no logical contradiction there, just a way of pointing out something counterintuitive about reality and maths.
What I like about Zeno's motion based paradoxes is they have this aspect of "here's a reasonable model of motion, and here's the ridiculous result you get from it." There's clearly something wrong in the model, but working it out takes a while, you need someone to come around and invent series first.
After a little reading, I think I just like falsidical paradoxes and don't like veridical paradoxes.
[weirdly, someone discovered an birthday overlap today at work and i just re-google/wiki'd this today]
Sadly nobody called it baader-meinhof paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinomy
Yes, all antinomies are paradoxes but not all paradoxes are antinomies.
That's just one kind of paradox in one domain (say, logic). There are well known named paradoxes of several different types, belonging to several different domains...
No real indication of what anyone should DO with such information.
Do you build infrastructure? If no, the fact that 10 feet of rain can fall is mostly useless, unless you're buying a house downstream of a dam to keep in the family.
The situation is widely reported because it's a great fear based headline and gets the clicks. With that said, it's something every civil engineer that could build a project in CA should know about, because their decisions now could lead to the death of a very large number of people at some point in the future. That marginal wetland that could be reclaimed for housing shouldn't be, unless you like the news that comes out of Houston every once in a while.
So? Most paradoxes can be described as "people having trouble understanding X".
The Liar's paradox is "people having trouble understanding meta-statements" (at least according to Russel's theory).
Zeno's Ahilles paradox is people not understanding convergent infinite series's.
The Potato paradox is people not understanding algebra.
The Friendship paradox is people not understanding statistics.
And so on...
Otherwise it just seems like a relationship between two variables…