Solving Complex Problems
A reflection on “Long Distance Thinking” by Simon Sarris
Articulating ideas as simply as possible is attractive, not least because getting people to agree with us is attractive. But we have a tendency to overrate ideas that can be shared easily, with the most apparent advantages.
When I try to learn new ideas, I often turn to Wikipedia. More often than not, the article I’m looking for is loaded with relevant information compiled from all sorts of different information across the internet. Contrast this with social media: as soon as I open up Twitter, it’s apparent that everyone is fighting for my attention and all of them seem to think that what they have to say is more important than that which anyone else has to say. Is this the best we can do? When I first learned about the concept of Twitter, probably 5 or so years ago, it was described as a public forum – the modern-day soapbox in the public square, where anyone could have their voice heard. What a noble concept! The reality of social media in 2022 is that everything is competing for your time. And this of course makes perfect sense! – the more time you spend on a social media platform, the more exposure you have to advertisers, the more data can be collected to leverage more ads to you, and the more revenue the platform can stand to earn from said advertisers: the perfect cycle! Of course, even though I understand all of this, it’s still shockingly easy to end up getting ‘sucked’ into the sphere of influence social media harnesses over people.
Articulating an idea on social media as simply as possible is important because, as Simon says, “getting people to agree with us is attractive.” Is it easier to get someone to learn about a topic like the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by reading a Wikipedia article, or by posting a 15 second slide on your Instagram story? The more informative outcome is not the most attractive – we would rather get someone to choose the attractive outcome (agree with us) over actually developing an understanding for the topic.
The archives of human cleverness are filled with blunders. When read in a good mood, history is a blooper reel. But it should not be lost on us that history never repeats, and modern technology enables ever more leverage. The more technology you can harness to commit an idea, and the faster your idea can spread, the greater the magnitude of something going wrong with a single decision. Scale is a capricious beast, one that becomes easier to summon and harder to predict. Be very careful when you let it in the house.
This gets at what is, in my belief, the heart of Simon’s argument. Society has come to terms with the idea that scaling technology ever upward will erase every problem. When viewed at surface-level, without thinking ‘long distance’ about it, it is easy to see why. Technology has scaled linearly since 1970. More people have access to technology now than ever before. What could go wrong? It is important to check these assumptions and analyze everything with a “long-distance” perspective. How will children’s brain development respond to remote learning? How will the human psyche react to trauma associated with COVID-19 lockdowns? All of these questions can’t be answered by an Instagram post or a quick Tweet. As Tolkien once said, “Short cuts make long delays.”
A topical example of this is the recent push (and subsequent pushback) for nuclear energy. It is well documented that the greatest cause of climate change is the burning of coal. At the same time, the safety and power output capacity of nuclear is more than enough to supplement and eventually replace the burning of fossil fuels. Despite this, nuclear energy still has a negative connotation. It is viewed as an unsafe alternative to fossil fuels, even though the death rate from nuclear power production is estimated to be ~350 times lower than burning coal. Nevertheless, decades of nuclear disinformation campaigns have caused the American public to believe that nuclear energy is unclean and causes serious injury or death. This mistake of not thinking long-distance in respect to nuclear is that many continue to reject nuclear power as a catalyst for combating climate change in the face of the extreme benefits it provides. The real mistake, however, are the policy choices reflected by continuing to not think long-distance. The result? No new nuclear power plants since 1975 have reached operation.
I’ll leave you with what Simon concludes with:
The cure for over-summary, I think, is something akin to cultivation. States and maturity need good growing conditions and time. The wonder we should concern ourselves with: What else has been hidden by summary? What thoughts must we resist abridging? Those giant sequoias echo a reminder to ask ourselves, what are the unseen things today that could be growing?
Read Simon’s full article on Substack here.