Ecosystems, and organisms in them, generally don’t care about stuff that can’t be turned into power-within-the-ecosystem. Box two exists, but unless the members of box one can utilize box two for e.g. information/computation/communication, it doesn’t matter to anyone in box one.
Other places where this applies:
Highly competitive industries won’t care about externalities or the long-term future. Externalities and the future are in box two. They might not even be modeled.
Young people have a personal interest in making their life better when they’re older, but under sufficient competitive pressure (e.g. in competitive workplaces, or in status-based social groups), won’t do so. Nursing homes are box two.
People playing power games at a high level (e.g. in politics) will have a hard time caring about anything not directly relevant to the power game. Most of the actual effects are, from the perspective of the power game, in box two; those effects that actually are directly relevant get modeled as part of the power game itself, i.e. box one. Signing a bill is not about the policy effects, it’s about signalling, because the policy effects only affect the power game on a pretty long timescale (and likely won’t even be modeled from within the power game), and signalling affects it immediately.
(These examples are somewhat worse for making the point because the case is much more clear in the case of evolution; humans are sometimes rational agents that act non-ecologically)
Ecosystems, and organisms in them, generally don’t care about stuff that can’t be turned into power-within-the-ecosystem. Box two exists, but unless the members of box one can utilize box two for e.g. information/computation/communication, it doesn’t matter to anyone in box one.
Other places where this applies:
Highly competitive industries won’t care about externalities or the long-term future. Externalities and the future are in box two. They might not even be modeled.
Young people have a personal interest in making their life better when they’re older, but under sufficient competitive pressure (e.g. in competitive workplaces, or in status-based social groups), won’t do so. Nursing homes are box two.
People playing power games at a high level (e.g. in politics) will have a hard time caring about anything not directly relevant to the power game. Most of the actual effects are, from the perspective of the power game, in box two; those effects that actually are directly relevant get modeled as part of the power game itself, i.e. box one. Signing a bill is not about the policy effects, it’s about signalling, because the policy effects only affect the power game on a pretty long timescale (and likely won’t even be modeled from within the power game), and signalling affects it immediately.
(These examples are somewhat worse for making the point because the case is much more clear in the case of evolution; humans are sometimes rational agents that act non-ecologically)
The examples are really clear and makes the OP much more interesting to me, thanks. I retract my criticism.