Either problem XYZ is easy, or most people get it wrong, but not both

unlisted: true

There are some things in the world that feel like they should be easy, but given how infrequently they occur, we must consider them to be difficult. We can call these problems empirically hard, based on how we must assume them to be hard based on the evidence, and not based on our analysis of the problem.

You can look at these things on a case-by-case basis (and we will), but your dominant conclusion should be that of humility: if something seems trivial, but you don’t see that thing as frequently as you’d expect, you must conclude that you’re missing some evidence.

It might be that the thing is indeed trivial and that there’s some other factor which reduces the occurrence of the thing, but sometimes the thing just really isn’t trivial.

A few examples will help clarify this point.

Public Transport

Oh boy, to people love to hate on public transport. The trains are late, the buses are slow, the ferries are uncomfortable, the underground is crowded. It seems so easy! And yet, observing the fact that most countries do not have any form of wide spread public transport, and those that do are some of the most wealthy countries in the world, we must conclude that public transport is empirically hard. Your arguments about what the government should do to fix public transport are for naught if they cannot predict why the wealthiest countries in the world do not consistently have functioning public transport networks. If your argument is “literally every country on earth is doing a bad job” then maybe you should consider that the task you set out for them is trickier than you think.

Public transport has challenges, such as being implemented on a massive scale and involving country

Empathy

The ability to take on another person’s perspective and to see from their world view doesn’t feel like it’s hard to do. “Just put yourself in their shoes”¹, cried so many preschool teachers trying to get classmates to cooperate.

Teaching people to be scared of AGI

This seems to be empirically hard

Teaching people to be scared of global warming

Or indeed, any large scale societal change

---

An essay about things which seem easy but, based on how infrequently they occur in the world, must actually be hard.

• Global coordination

• Better education

• Eliminating corruption

• Public transport. Just move people. But also only the most wealthy societies in the world are able to make this work, and even then people complain about them

• Memory safety. Just free your pointers. Except the experts cannot do this properly

• Teaching people effectively

• Social benefits programs

• Fair democracies

• empathy

• also funding science research to

Footnotes

1. “Just” is my favourite word here. ↩