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Colleen Smith, MD's avatar

This essay brings to mind an article from the New Yorker that I read a few years ago about flying cars. As I child, I thought we would have flying cars by now, but we still don't have them. Where are they? From that article, I was struck by the idea that much of innovation and development of new "stuff" has associated risk and as a society, we have grown less and less risk tolerant.

For example, flying cars that exist and are being developed today have lower risk of death or injury than human driven cars. With a cursory search I find one fatality (from a self converted Pinto) and a few cases of flying car crash where the drivers survive, even walk away unharmed. Yet even one fatality from a company dedicated to building flying cars could end the experiment!

I see this in medicine too. People are afraid of radiation from an xray. And while they aren't wrong, they also get that same amount of radiation from an airplane flight but they will still fly. And don't even get me started on vaccines...

I think you're right that if we begin to change the narrative of how we talk about progress and solutions, we could start to see more progress!

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Matt Boulton's avatar

I LOVE Solutionism. It expresses everything I strive to be about. I'm promoting it enthusiastically here:

https://matthewboulton.substack.com/p/solutionism-and-objective-optimism

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