Welcome to the Long Range wiki. This site collects all of the posts on long-range thinking (LRT) over at my blog. (Things are pretty rough here at the moment - I'll be editing and re-ordering things as we settle in.)

Introduction

When it comes to thinking about and planning for the future, my intuition tells me that most people are better at thinking about short-term consequences than longer-term ones. The graph could look something like this:

The question is: what tools and techniques can we use or create to make it look more like this:

Also, my intuition tells me that most people are better at thinking about things in their immediate vincinity than bigger ones.

Understand there's a problem.

Understand what the problem is.

Understand how to solve the problem.

Hypothesis: People make the best decisions they can. When deciding, their short-term interests (the ones that have an immediate impact on them) usually outweigh their long-term interests.

I suspect that one's reasonably uncontroversial.

I wonder if you could say this, though: People make the best decisions they can. Under extreme circumstances people could be persuaded to think about their best interests in terms of things that will happen in their lifetime. They might possibly think about it terms of their children, and maybe maybe in terms of their grandchildren.

People who voluntarily think at the century or millenia level - like Jim Hansen or Professor Vaclav Smil - are extremely rare. What makes them different?

Types of LRT

Elements of LRT

What prevents LRT?

Interesting Ideas

Links to my other wikis