When people tell me something is going end up as one extreme or the other, I usually conclude that we’re likely to end up with a distribution around the middle

The world doesn’t change that much that fast, and it’s too tempting to think otherwise

I love how presenting the two extreme tails in future scenarios get people thinking about the more nuanced middle pathways. Feels like an inherently human trait to reject absolutes that needs to be leveraged more

How we got here and where we're going. URL<>IRL @ v6acolab.org / SoP ☀️

As I see it, humans "reject" one absolute by embracing another. The force pushing them back towards the other end is not necessarily the success of the opposite side, but rather the failure of the side that you overcommitted to.

Similar concepts can be found along the lines of "do you run away from, or towards something". Or the classic sports outcome "did we lose or did they win".

Tangentially related, there is this concept of mistaking system inputs for system outputs, which is very common for humans trying to read their environment. E.g. the river didn't just start to flow through the forest, the forest actually grew along the river.