Yeah, there may be quite a gap between “what people say they consider valuable when making decisions” and “what people seem to value, based on the decisions they make.”
The intention of this post is more around a change to communication style that may make the reader more open to the message when they first hear it.
My intuition based on common psychology and communications principles is that Westerners would still be more amenable to “we already say we value this” than “we are extremely poor at this.” Even if the “we” was a wider societal “we” that doesn’t end up including the individual reader.
Perhaps what I undervalued in the bottle example is that (as in Peter’s comment) it gives a concrete image for people to start bridging that gap, as you say. It’s not about getting the reader into a state where they are amenable to the general message, it’s about convincing the reader that they can care about the far-far future.
Yeah, there may be quite a gap between “what people say they consider valuable when making decisions” and “what people seem to value, based on the decisions they make.”
The intention of this post is more around a change to communication style that may make the reader more open to the message when they first hear it.
My intuition based on common psychology and communications principles is that Westerners would still be more amenable to “we already say we value this” than “we are extremely poor at this.” Even if the “we” was a wider societal “we” that doesn’t end up including the individual reader.
Perhaps what I undervalued in the bottle example is that (as in Peter’s comment) it gives a concrete image for people to start bridging that gap, as you say. It’s not about getting the reader into a state where they are amenable to the general message, it’s about convincing the reader that they can care about the far-far future.