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An issue is when there's an issue which people with information are trying to work around, word gets out & the risk becomes exaggerated to societal collapse. Ne
by __s 7y ago
An issue is when there's an issue which people with information are trying to work around, word gets out & the risk becomes exaggerated to societal collapse. Nevermind that a plague could come & kill half the population & society wouldn't collapse. So when people get the idea that we're trying to stop society from collapsing, they expect we'll still see society almost collapse. But instead we're averting a much lower risk (which is still very costly) & so the final price we pay is nowhere near "if we hadn't done X, society would've collapsed"
Basically we need to moderate both opinions which effectively work together: the "there's no problem to begin with" group feels validated by the "the world is ending" group being way off the mark
This happens with global warming too. Some people think everything's going to fall apart within the next 10 years. They're wrong. So others claim there isn't a problem, because they were wrong
- mistermann 7y ago> Basically we need to moderate both opinions which effectively work together: the "there's no problem to begin with" group feels validated by the "the world is ending" group being way off the mark. I agree. Do you have any idea what approach could be taken to accomplish this though, even where dealing with a single, otherwise logical person?
- __s 7y agoI have a fair share of interactions with the apocalyptic crowd, so this is based on interactions with that side I tend to try to demonstrate napkin math with pessimistic numbers to show that they're out of bound. Napkin math is particularly useful math because it allows one to play with parameters & abstracts/aggregates complicated bits. So we can also show how pessimistic things would have to be for them to be right, ie what we should be seeing now which would support their projection outside of their anecdotes or imagination It's important to not become identified as an adversary (ie, I'm not denying a problem when I assert they should reduce their perceived risk). This means making sure to underline which facts you agree on, & verify that your values are aligned
- mistermann 7y agoThat will work in some cases, but how might one best approach examples like we see in this thread, where numerous people seem to exhibit signs of allowing their heuristic biases to interfere with basic logical thinking, committing the very same logical errors that they accuse others of, in the same comment?