Nobody wants to be controlled.
Everybody wants to be entertained.
In a democracy, this is a recipe for mediocrity, because reaching consensus and buy-in is so difficult, it is easier to ignore hard problems than to solve them.
Everybody wants to be entertained.
In a democracy, this is a recipe for mediocrity, because reaching consensus and buy-in is so difficult, it is easier to ignore hard problems than to solve them.
Pretending there is no bound leads to a big trap.
Its like telling second graders they can solve tenth grade problems. They cant no matter what they are entertained by, how well they built od consensus or how hard they work. All that it archives is make them feel useless or angry and plants the seeds for pointless blame games.
Huxley and Orwell are irrelevant as they focus on things beyond the bound. Naturally they have no workable solutions out of the trap.
Bounded rationality however does recommends a way out of the trap - work on simple problems. Thats how the ants thrive.
Climate change is a simple problem, reducible to just one number - the percentage of C02 in Earth's atmosphere.
What is difficult is not the technical challenge of how to reduce C02 emissions. We have known that for thousands of years, and all societies practised it until recently. They went about their business without burning fossil fuels.
What is difficult is to get people to walk back from convenience. Once you've driven on the freeway to the beach in 30 minutes, stopping by the supermarket on the way to pick up a bbq chicken and a can of asparagus imported from Argentina for $1.50, nothing will convince you to go back to the old way of living.
Most people would say the pursuit of convenience is at the core of their definition of rationality. If that's the case, we aren't limited by an upper bound on rationality so much as condemned by our perpetual desire to exceed it.
Child prodigies exist.