Spending time in San Francisco, with its subtle but frequent earthquake reminders, makes me think of how poorly humans deal with nonlinear effects. Humans intuitively understand linear effects - a small change will result in a small effect and a large change will result in a large effect. Many change-effect relationships in nature are approximately linear. For example seasonal temperature change. In the Northern Hemisphere, temperatures typically wax during the spring and summer and wane during the fall and winter as a result of the Earth's axis tilt.
Nonlinear effects take us by surprise. Nonlinear natural events are more difficult to understand. Insert your most salient natural disaster. If change-effect relationships deviants from linear, we fail to understand (or predict) the results.
In contrast to the natural world, the human-driven world is becoming increasing nonlinear because of interconnections. That means the total number and impact of the nonlinear events are increasing. To deal with this change in the world, new heuristics are needed. Our "natural" (linear) heuristics are no longer sufficient.
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