“The other reason is that our environment has changed drastically, so that once goal-tracking shortcuts are now misleading. Our ancestors only ever lived in small groups, not in a globalized world where they could positively or negatively affect the lives of future generations or people living on other continents. Our intuitions fail to adequately keep track of large numbers, because brain size is limited and emotions cannot scale indefinitely; besides, up until very recently, we were never playing for stakes this high. Similarly, exponential processes or low-probability high impact scenarios are intuitively neglected as well, because the corresponding scenarios did not come up often enough in our evolutionary past.”

— Lukas Gloor, Rationality: The science of winning, Part III (Raising for Effective Giving)