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For being so smart, we are so dumb
It's not just that we're stupid. We're also selfish.
Many are proud of their stupidity.
And their selfishness.
Huge difference between raw intellectual capacity and exercised utility.
You can have a 10 gallon bucket, but it'll only carry that much water if you fill it.
We think we are smart enough to get away with it.
Well, to be fair, we're hobbled by the fact that we evolved to think in terms of short-term solutions on a very limited time-scale such that what makes intuitive sense to us is often at odds with what science tells us to be true.
Said short-term thinking has served us very well as we've become the dominant species on the planet, but now that we're here, it's a drawback in the sense that it's difficult for many of us to think outside of the parameters that evolution has equipped us with.
What science shows us is that most of reality, from geological time to the vast scale of space and the infinitesimally small is far far out of the relatively tiny range of reality that we've evolved to make intuitive sense of.
This, together with a much broader coordination problem that arises from our evolved tribalistic tendencies, means that in spite of our intelligence, we are not well equipped to address long-term problems that require collective action on a global scale.
That said, I don't have any answers. We're in a tight spot and I don't think we're going to get out of it without a lot of pain.