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The Future: Where are the Colors and the Sports? - LessWrong

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One can imagine a variety of reasons for why “The Future” (as imagined in our collective consciousness) is blue and black, many of which are mundane and fairly obvious. The screens on our phones, laptops, and TVs are black (the inspiration behind the name of the science fiction series Black Mirror) and it’s probably a good bet that the future will have even more screens (one day we will decide to replace the whole sky with a screen so that it’s never cloudy and every sunset is picturesque). In general, technology calls to mind darker and more metallic colors (silver and grey also seem abundant in our imagined future). The future also calls to mind space exploration which is a very black and blue type of affair - from our grey metallic spaceships we will all look back at our home planet, a pale blue dot hanging in the void. There may be a less obvious and more interesting reason why we tend to envision the future with a certain aesthetic (darker color palette, sleek, smooth, shiny, etc.).1 Construal-level theory describes how distance of all kinds (temporally, spatially, socially, emotionally, conceptually, etc.) form one general cognitive dimension and how this dimension (near vs. far) affects the abstraction of our thinking. To get a better sense of the theory, I’ll share an abstract from a review paper (slightly more technical) and a few sections from the wikipedia page (slightly less technical). From Trope and Liberman (2010), “Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance” People are capable of thinking about the future, the past, remote locations, another person's perspective, and counterfactual alternatives. Without denying the uniqueness of each process, it is proposed that they constitute different forms of traversing psychological distance. Psychological distance is egocentric: Its reference point is the self in the here and now, and the different ways in which an object might be removed from that point-in time, in space, in social distance, and in h

x The Future: Where are the Colors and the Sports? — LessWrong Rationality World Modeling Curated 82 The Future: Where are the Colors and the Sports? by rogersbacon 8th Aug 2021 9 min read 37 82 One can imagine a variety of reasons for why “The Future” (as imagined in our collective consciousness) is blue and black, many of which are mundane and fairly obvious. The screens on our phones, laptops, and TVs are black (the inspiration behind the name of the science fiction series Black Mirror) and it’s probably a good bet that the future will have even more screens (one day we will decide to repla

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