Unit 4: Design and Potential Interventions

The “Star Trek” prompt asks us to brainstorm interventions where the limits of practicality are removed. How might people be doing this behavior in a hundred years? A thousand? If you had omnipotent power, how would you change the pressure?

This takes advantage of another human bias: anchoring and adjustment. In general, when we try to estimate something, we set an anchor and then adjust. If I ask you “Is the Statue of Liberty taller or shorter than a thousand feet?”, you’ll think it must be shorter and so adjust down to something like 800 feet. But if I ask someone else using the anchor of ten feet, they’ll decide it must be larger than ten feet and guess something like 80 feet. 80 versus 800 is a big difference.

We have the same problem when we brainstorm: we tend to set our anchor at what is true now and then adjust forward a bit. But we can get a lot farther if we think what will be true in the future and adjust backward; we may not make it all the way but it’ll still be farther!