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Here is what creates cognitive dissonance and drives inaction. The BP spill came with apocalyptic rhetoric about the destruction of the gulf and gulf coast. Yet

Here is what creates cognitive dissonance and drives inaction. The BP spill came with apocalyptic rhetoric about the destruction of the gulf and gulf coast. Yet, within a few years, things are near normal. Please, I’m not saying it wasn’t a tragic, disruptive, damaging event. Just that the reality has diverged wildly from the story told at the time. This creates distrust and inaction for every new apocalyptic prediction. No doubt, at some point, an apocalyptic prediction will come true, and we’ll be caught with our pants down.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> No doubt, at some point, an apocalyptic prediction will come true, and we’ll be caught with our pants down. We consistently have this problem with preventative measures. Someone accurately predicts that something terrible will happen unless we do something about it, we spend a large amount of time and money preventing or mitigating it, then people ask why we spent all that time and money when the thing turned out not to be that bad. It turned out not to be that bad because we spend all that time and money. The problem is it's also easy to spend time and money on wasteful pork barrel projects to prevent threats that don't actually exist but line the pockets of government contractors, and then they make the same argument for not cutting them. What we need is a better way to separate the legitimate problems (e.g. climate change) from the hype (e.g. terrorism). Because if you're going to pay a bunch of money for something that also serves as a jobs program, it might as well be addressing the real problem instead of the fake one.