Some of this skepticism, surely, reflects the inherent difficulty of imagining unimaginable scales of time and space.
"People may confuse the difficulty of imagining personal change with the unlikelihood of change itself," the authors wrote in Science.
The emergent dynamism of the involved interdependent systems and the difficulty of imagining all possible consequences must give us great pause.
It is the difficulty of imagining such changes that makes schemes like Levitt and Dubner's at once so alluring and so dangerous.
The armed forces now talk a lot about flexibility, though this is not so much a voguish notion as a reflection of the difficulty of imagining threats to a country that is almost instinctively pacifist.
Afghanistan's national security forces, comprising primarily soldiers and national policemen, number about 320,000, often young and uneducated men who were drawn in by the dearth of other jobs and the difficulty of imagining a life that doesn't involve fighting.
Leaving aside the difficulty of imagining how James's late prose could have been dictated at all, much less to the racket made by a Remington typewriter circa 1900, don't we assume that James reread what had been typed and was lavish with his corrections?
The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay titled "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?," in which he pointed out the difference between the difficulty of imagining what it would be like for him to be a bat (how it would feel to hang upside down in the dark, or to fly about and steer by sound, and so on) and the utter impossibility of imagining what it is like for a bat to be a bat.
Among these, the difficulty of imagining the unverifiable evolutionary changes of environments and living beings over geological time was recorded (in fact it is difficult to master spatial and temporal scales).
The Impact of the Highly Improbable, in which the author poses the problem of the growing difficulty of imagining a future that has not been extrapolated from the present, a projection of today on tomorrow, which we consider - precisely because it is thought of in this way - can be coped with by referring back to the same prevalent, hegemonic conceptual pictures of the moment (Taleb 2008).
