https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=scjbU1DodII
So I might say, well why are you going to university? Or I might say, what are you doing right now? And then the answer would be, well I’m sitting in class. And then the question would be, well why are you sitting in class? And the answer to that would be, well because I want to take this course. And why? Well it’s because I want to get my degree. Why? Well because I want to be prepared for a career and a productive and high quality life when I get out. Well why? You know, you can keep saying why pretty much indefinitely and as you answer you go farther and farther out in time scales. Now it’s a tricky thing because one of the things I might tell you, this is a very complex cognitive problem, is well where should you stop? So for example, I could say to you, do you want 100 now. How about 200 years? It’s like, well I’m not going to be there. I’ll take the $100 now. So obviously thinking out 200 years is not that helpful. Now you might think, well no, you should calculate the effects of your actions on the vastest time span possible and include the largest number of people if you’re really going to equilibrate it. But the problem is you can’t do the computations. Because you get this thing called combinatorial explosion happening, which is like a chessboard. You make one move, okay fine. But then you could make four and then with each of those you could make four more and then with each of those you could make four more. And soon if you’re looking 20 moves ahead it’s like there’s so many moves that the other person could possibly make that looking that far ahead is pointless. You can’t do the computations. And so we don’t know how far you should look into the future. It depends on how stable your environment is. But one month seems okay, a year, yeah. Three to five years, that’s what I’ll have you do when you do the future authoring program. Twenty years? Hmm. Probably not. And the reason for that is the margin of error in your prediction grows so large that your prediction isn’t worth anything. And you can really see how that’s the case now. Because like, what’s it going to be like in 20 years? When I was a kid I used to read science fiction. It was like plausible accounts of the potential future. It’s like, now? Who knows? Anything could happen. You know, you could be three quarters robot in 20 years. You could have a lifespan of 10,000 years. We just do not know. We could be living in caves again with everything in ruins. We don’t have a clue what’s going to happen. So 20 years span, I would say get friendly with computers. So 20 years span is too long. So okay, anyways, what I’m pointing out is that you have to calculate what you’re doing across multiple spans of time and in combination with many, many people. And that makes things very complex. But that’s how you’re building the structures that you live within.