An interesting philosophical insight is that we do not live inside reality, we live in the model of reality we create with our senses, our mind and… our culture, which video games are part of.
The bleu qualia of the sky is a construction of your mind. The Earth as a planet is something you know but you did not experience directly. Same for the pain of others or neurodiversity. Countries you have never been to occupy a similar place as fictional places in your mind. Normal people sort these things well into “existing” and “fiction” but similar mechanisms exist.
Fill this place of examples of criminality and self-centered egoism, and it brings a vision of the world. Fill it with benevolence and empathy and you get a different one.
It leads to very concrete consequences, like the strategy people would choose in a blind prisoner’s dilemma game.
but how do we encourage people to actually… move through that gateway instead of just staying at the entrance?
You empower them with tools. When I gave someone a cheap servo, a reaction I got was “Hey, it sounds like the robot in that movie”. And there, you realize that the components in that box can be robots.
Games like minecraft or Stardew Valley give a notion of how you can change a place. Or destroy a biome.
A/C is indeed not a solution for solving climate change. It’s merely a solution to survive the transition that we are trying to do. The solution is in how you produce the electricity, among others, to feed the A/C.
There is some additional heat that an AC system will create, but the heat that goes out of the external block is not heat that was created by the system. It’s heat that was displaced and that would otherwise come through other ways in the atmosphere.
A theoretical perfect heat pump would not heat the atmosphere at all, despite having a heating part. The heating would be perfectly balanced by the cooling part.
It is a bit counterintuitive when you think about machines as creating heat or creating cold. A better way to look at it is in terms of energy evacuation.
A house without any AC will radiate heat because humans inside, machines inside, they do produce heat. So that heat goes out in the atmosphere through the walls and through the windows when the inside is warmer than the outside. An AC creates a sort of channel for the heat to go all through the external block and it blasts hot air at a specific place. But what you don’t see is that as a result your colder house radiates less heat and actually may to some extent cool the atmosphere around it.
Both effects balance each other out. There is a difference because a heat pump is not a 100% efficient system. So you do have additional heat that gets there as waste. But it’s not on the same level as what gets blasted out of the external unit.