| >a) Thinking you'll get away with something is categorically different from knowing it. Nobody ever experiences this sort of assuredness That's not really important at the personal behavior level (the thing we're discussing, and which the article addresses) though, but more of a pedantic dictinction, isn't it? We can't even be sure that we'll not die from a sudden heart attack in the next 10 minutes, but we nonetheless act and plan as if we have a 100% certainty that we wont, and we even feel that way (that is, we don't feel as this is an "open thing", we thing we'll live just fine - except those of us who have a related phobia and anxiety). >When your bottle slips and shatters on the hiking trail, nobody - not a single human soul - runs Monte Carlo simulations on where those shards might end up and what that might mean for the future of humanity and "solves back" the right action. I'd say most humans will worry about somebody stepping on the glass on a public trail (or even less pressing concerns, like the impact of the litter on the environment, the possibility of the sun starting a fire through the shards, and so on) and will try to pick those shards. Heck, many will feel guilt if they don't. Whether they run Monte Carlo simulations or just use some conscious rational logic to deduce the possible issue, is not really important to the question, is it? So, the question would remain, why do we care for the possibility in the future of someone we don't even know stepping on the shards in 1 day or 1 year or 5 years, but not for other consequences of our actions far further in the future? I'd say the real answer is because they're too dispersed (based on many levels of n-th order effects and cascading consequences) and too remote (1-2 generations in the future is beyond a reasonable horizon for most people). |