> Bounded rationality however does recommends a way out of the trap - work on simple problems
Climate change is a simple problem, reducible to just one number - the percentage of C02 in Earth's atmosphere.
What is difficult is not the technical challenge of how to reduce C02 emissions. We have known that for thousands of years, and all societies practised it until recently. They went about their business without burning fossil fuels.
What is difficult is to get people to walk back from convenience. Once you've driven on the freeway to the beach in 30 minutes, stopping by the supermarket on the way to pick up a bbq chicken and a can of asparagus imported from Argentina for $1.50, nothing will convince you to go back to the old way of living.
Most people would say the pursuit of convenience is at the core of their definition of rationality. If that's the case, we aren't limited by an upper bound on rationality so much as condemned by our perpetual desire to exceed it.
In a democracy, this is a recipe for mediocrity, because reaching consensus and buy-in is so difficult, it is easier to ignore hard problems than to solve them.
> But does your average person use more than six sources for news?
The average person might rely on 2 or 3 sources of news. But it's a different world when they have to choose those sources from 6 that are running the same line, compared to a world in which hundreds of diverse viewpoints are ready and waiting to shine a light on any issue.
As Neil Postman pointed out, it's less Orwell and more Huxley.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.""
The biggest loss to society from this change arises from how the billions of dollars of revenue from advertising is spent.
Old media used to plough the money into investigative journalism and local news. New media doesn't do that, which is why our current crop of "leaders" in politics are drawn from celebrity culture and thrive on ignorance.
This is the argument Hubert Dreyfuss advances to postulate Artificial General Intelligence can never be achieved - because computers are not “in the world.”
> One of the leading critics was the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all.
> it's probably impossible to market a product like this well.
At the right price, with 100% uptime, motorcycle airbags would be a monster hit product. I say that with confidence because as a motorcycle rider who is aware of the stats which tell me we risk death and serious injury 8X more than car drivers.
I want a motorcycle airbag - at the right price and conditions.
Who doesn't?
And why don't they exist?
What would be the cost to manufacture them at the rate of 500 million a year? That's the global market potential.
p.s. Do motorcycle airbags actually work to significantly prevent injury and death? If the answer is that they aren't particularly efficacious anyway, even when ideally implemented, I can understand why they scarcely exist in the market.
That form of belief gets fixed in your mind via a very different method to beliefs such as "what goes up must come down".
It's not a result of distilling evidence.
It's a result of persuasion.