Comment by avcloudy

I think a really good takeaway is that we're bad at predicting the future. That is the most solid prediction of history. Before we thought speech recognition was impossible, we thought it would be easy. We thought a lot of problems would be easy, and it turned out a lot of them were not. We thought a lot of problems would be hard, and we use those technologies now.

Another lesson history has taught us though, is that people don't defend narratives, they defend status. Not always successfully. They might not update beliefs, but they act effectively, decisively and sometimes brutally to protect status. You're making an evolutionary biology argument (which is always shady!) but people see loss of status as an existential threat, and they react with anger, not just denial.