There is very little careful thinking about the far future. Yes, many people talk about the far future as if they cared, but typical interest rates suggest few care much, and most far future discussion seems to be symbolic talk about current issues. Furthermore, when people do actually directly discuss the far future, they tend to engage in an extreme far-think, vs. a more practical near-think:
- [NEAR] All of these bring each other more to mind: here, now, me, us; trend-deviating likely real local events; concrete, context-dependent, unstructured, detailed, goal-irrelevant incidental features; feasible safe acts; secondary local concerns; socially close folks with unstable traits.
- [FAR] Conversely, all these bring each other more to mind: there, then, them; trend-following unlikely hypothetical global events; abstract, schematic, context-freer, core, coarse, goal-related features; desirable risk-taking acts, central global symbolic concerns, confident predictions, polarized evaluations, socially distant people with stable traits.
While our future vision should fade into an increasingly vast and uncertain fog of possibilities, far future fans instead fragment into factions, each confident in a very different view of the important future issues. Factions use such different assumptions that they rarely build on each others’ work, or even engage others in debate. Only they really “get it” you see, and few others ever seriously consider their arguments. Extreme far-thinking apparently produces extreme disagreement.
Such fragmentation may be acceptable when searching a large space for rare combinations, but it is severely dysfunctional for advising common actions. We instead need to find ways for the few people who actually care about the far future to work together via a division of labor. But how can we do that? Just tell each faction to reconsider that they might be mistaken?
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