People are quite comfortable admitting that a given harm will cause the same amount of pain now as in the future, while also admitting to caring less about that pain’s future occurrence. 2/3

However, increasing the vividness of that future pain removes the empathy gap. The upshot: rational argument alone won’t overcome the mind’s built in tendency to devalue the future. We have to use techniques that work from the bottom up by leveraging the tools the mind uses to empathize. 3/3