> 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.
The sudden unexpected death of someone close who we rely on for warmth and hope leaves a gaping hole that is literally a wound in our existence. The same can be so for a death that is a long time in the making, and expected, because it is a loss of what is dear to us.
At first we are confronted with absence. Where once there was comfort and inspiration, suddenly there is pain. It hurts to recall the strengths of this person because to animate their memory is to emphasise their distance and test our ability to come to grips with what seems like a permanent disconnection.
Over time, inevitably, as we visit this absence again and again, we see our loss for what it is - the deep impression made by a human being who moved us with a strength of character and and intimate meaning on a deeply personal scale.
At some point, we may begin to see this absence as something more than the personal impression made upon us, and more than just our loss, great though that is.
The space left by the departure of our beloved is never empty. It is the measure of the person. It is them - in silhouette - and we visit them with the respect they command. To see them in this way is to start to reconnect with the strength and joy they brought us, for their energy is still a part of us and it lives on in surprising ways.
We might not even have recognised their presence in us when we expected there would always be more of them to come. But in their absence, we see their silhouette again and again in our daily existence, in the way we respond to the things they used to respond to. They surprise us with their presence every day. In difficult times and in joy, suddenly, there they are. We know exactly what they would have said because we hear them say it. They are with us.
When we see a loved one in this light, we see them in their entirety for the first time. The extent of their reach is revealed to us each time we see them appear anew in the space we at first thought we had been banished to alone.
We weren't alone, and we aren't alone, because the connection we enjoyed has made us who we are, and we are still that person - the composition of our selves and the person who helped to make us who we are. That never changes. It just keeps growing, because each day, as we live our lives being who we are, we touch other people with the same forces that once shaped us. It is then that we begin to see their soul live on through us, with us, beyond us and all around us.
> 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.