[marginalium]
Are We Too Impatient To Be Intelligent?
24 Sep 2024
Great article about the varieties of ways we are bad at thinking. Lots of examples, but mostly to do with how bad we are at time. Good throughout. One nice bit on particular on how technology starts as an option, then becomes an obligation:
I’m not making this up—people actually said, “Imagine how much leisure we’ll have if we can get to San Francisco in two and a half days rather than two weeks.” They imagined that your clients wouldn’t know that the railway existed, so you could pretend you’d gone by ship, spend 10 days playing golf, and then turn up by train
…
Unfortunately, that information became widely known, and you were expected to turn up in two days. And this leads to a problem, I think, which bedevils many technologies and many behaviors. It starts as an option, then it becomes an obligation. We welcome the technology at first because it presents us with a choice. But then everybody else has to adopt the technology, and we suddenly realize we’re worse off than we were when we started
Anthologies: Betterment, Gratification, Thought Architecture, Wealth Architecture, On Culture, On Thinking and Reasoning, Bias vs Noise, Noetik