You ever see a dog that’s got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it just cannot grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it’s never going to make the connection.
Obviously some dog breeds are smarter than others, ditto individual dogs - but you get the concept.
Is there an equivalent for humans? What ridiculously simple concept would have aliens facetentacling as they see us stumble around and utterly fail to reason about it?
Scope.
Imagine we both live in the US. I show you an article about an immigrant raping someone, and you say something like “well that’s just one guy.” I show you another, and another, and another. I show you a thousand. I show you ten thousand. Either you eventually admit that immigrants are predominantly rapists, or you look increasingly, ridiculously, obviously, wrong. And stubborn. And irrational.
But you are not wrong. I am wrong.
Because there are 331 million people in the United States, I can find an inexhaustible supply of immigrant-rapist stories.
Now take that inability to grasp large distances, large quantities, long periods of time, and apply it to everything. This is why young earth creationists exist- because a billion years is literally unimaginable. This is why people play the lottery- because you’re saying there’s a chance, right? This is why we don’t react emotionally upon hearing of a genocide, or learning that 70 billion animals are slaughtered each year for meat.
We are not equipped to function at the scale that we are currently working at, as a species. We have been haphazardly constructed by evolutionary pressures to operate in small bands and villages, and we do not have the appropriate intuitions for any scope larger than that.
Statistics and large numbers.
I studied statistics and the Law of Large Numbers is honestly mind boggling. I mean, I understand that it’s true and I’ve studied the proof, but it’s still enormously counterintuitive. It’s not surprising that anyone who isn’t familiar with it (which is the vast majority of people) to have no understanding of this phenomenon at all.
Unintended consequences. People like to propose grand schemes that will “fix everything”, but refuse to accept that there are downsides to that grand scheme.
In the same vein, refusing to consider something that will have a small positive effect, or a partial solution, because it won’t fix everything.
