The complex processes we call “systems” present special challenges to our uneducated imaginations. We tend to think additively, and are constantly surprised when something that seems to be “just added in” causes surprising and often disastrous changes.

One of the reasons the consequences were not imagined is that our human commonsense tends to think of “stability” as something static, whereas in systems it is a dynamic process that can be fragile to modest changes.

In our world, we have enough power to topple our most important systems, but not the power to restore most of them.

Being heroic in the face of disaster—as humans often are—will not help in most of these cases. This means that we have to “learn about consequences before they happen”. We have to be able to summon vivid enough imaginations of the disasters to be heroic long before they happen. And we have to educate our imaginations how to do this without introducing superstitions and paranoid delusions.