Dave5

Charlie Stross tackles the idea of how our mental models limit our thinking.

Anyway, a point I’ve already chewed over on this blog is that a spaceship is not like a sea-going vessel, can’t be operated like a sea-going vessel, and the word “ship” in its name feeds into various cognitive biases that may be actively harmful to understanding what it is.

Which leads me to the similar term “space colony”: the word colony drags in all sorts of historical baggage, and indeed invokes several models of how an off-Earth outpost might operate, all of which invoke very dangerous cognitive biases!

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/10/conceptual-models-of-space-col.html

That core concept: the trap of our mental models, dominates my thinking these days.