[pdonis]

> a simple hill climbing algorithm

Not at all. There is no such thing in a landscape that is changing on time scales that are visible to people, as our societies are. You can't stay stuck on a local maximum if the landscape changes it out from under you. You have to keep reconsidering things.

> you're happy to waste time arguing against them?

The (pretty limited) time I have spent posting in this discussion has not been wasted. I'm having fun.

[DiogenesKynikos]

You can get tightly boxed into one solution. In the US, car culture has caused a fundamental transformation of cities, which makes it extremely difficult to reintroduce public transit. Roads are very wide and there are massive parking lots everywhere, so it's difficult to reorient cities towards walking and public transit. You would have to eliminate those huge parking lots and reduce the number and size of roads in city centers, but because everyone already owns one or two cars, most people are dead-set against such changes.

There is another local optimum, which is extensive public transit and walkable city centers. I'd argue that that other local optimum is far preferable, but transitioning there is very difficult.

[pdonis]

> I'd argue that that other local optimum is far preferable

And I'd argue that this might be true for your preferences, but that doesn't mean it's true for everyone's. People have different preferences.

[DiogenesKynikos]

But because the vast majority of Americans have only ever been exposed to one solution, they have no idea if they would prefer the alternative. That's my point.

[pdonis]

> the vast majority of Americans have only ever been exposed to one solution

I disagree. It may be that the vast majority of Americans have never been exposed to your particular preferred solution, but that's also true of the vast majority of people who live anywhere except a few East Asian cities, according to you. So I don't see why you are singling out Americans. You should be chastising basically everyone outside of East Asia for being backward. (And then, of course, you would just have even more people ignoring you.)

[DiogenesKynikos]

Most Europeans have a decent idea of what good public transit looks like, and the "few East Asian cities" include almost every large city in China and Japan.

As for why I'm singling out Americans: this thread began with a discussion about Americans.