Been thinking a lot lately about this A. N. Whitehead quote:
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them"
Somebody quotes it at me every few years. It's a good idea but incomplete.
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There aren't that many important things that humans don't *want* to think about. There's a handful of unpleasant things, but mostly it's not that we don't want to think about stuff, but that we want to think about them *badly*... in ways that make it harder to do them
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Kids like to think about teeth -- in terms of tooth fairies
We all like to think about saving the world -- as superheroes
We all like to think about justice -- in terms of super-soldier revenge fantasies
We like to think about solving crises: in terms of personal heroism
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So I'd amend to "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform while harmlessly fantasizing about performing them in wildly ineffective or impossible ways"
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