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Hypothesis: your ability to think long-range gets better or worse depending on the situation.
In some areas of your life, you'll be great at it (finances or writing, for example), and in others you will suck (finances or writing, for example).
Pressure is probably a factor. Situations that have long-range implications but require an immediate response may lead to you not making the best decision. Pressure may inhibit long-range thinking.
... But I'm not entirely sure that this is what I mean when I talk about 'long-range'. Probably time to start unpacking that, and figuring out the different types of 'long-range thinking' there are.
Any suggestions?
2 comments:
What inhibits LRT?
Stupidity seems like the short answer. An over-reliance on our primary senses rather than the ability of our intellect to provide us information about what will happen, and what circumstances will be like. Arguably these are evolutionary drives, and with good reason, if you take an evolution-uber-alles approach, since if you don´t survive today, surviving ten years away is a moot point.
Also, for some reason ¨delayed gratification¨ springs to mind. Research done on kids, where basically, you give them a mallowpuff/whatever and tell them if they don´t eat it before you get back, you will give them another one; then you leave the room. Some eat it, some don´t. Whether or not you eat it predicts success in later life on a bunch of scales. (Being able to not eat it - delay gratification - being predictive of success.) How many kids could resist, do you think?
So yeah. This way of approaching the problem leads to considering us as stupid monkeys run by desires we do not have enough control over. Which leads me back to spiritual paths to reduce/control desire and act in a more holistic and positive fashion in the world.
Predicting the future is looking at the past and extending it to a theoretical outcome. The accuracy of the prediction goes up as you shorten the range of time from "now". In other words you can predict where a ball will land with much more accuracy if you only sampled a few milliseconds before it hit. But go back 10 minutes and you might not even be able to predict the ball would be thrown.
Any individual's ability to predict an outcome is directly related to the amount of specific history they have observed. An Oil Economist will be better at telling you what happens if oil runs out than say a Communications Specialist. But a Comm Spec might have a keen understanding of what happens in an information blackout.
I think the LRT project may be attempting to tap in to the many potential experiences of the members to see many events that could occur... then you could assign some likelihood to each and then engage yet more thinktanks to decide what happens if oil runs out *and* there is an info blackout... how do the two events play off each other.
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