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You do eat though, right? You may not surf with sharks but I wager you eat every day. Do you slice hotdogs into tiny pieces or do you chomp into them like a n
by catalogia 6y ago
You do eat though, right? You may not surf with sharks but I wager you eat every day. Do you slice hotdogs into tiny pieces or do you chomp into them like a normal person, apathetic to the small risk of choking?
You can split hairs if you like, but I think if you're honest about it you'll find that many activities in your daily routine have greater than three in a million odds of killing you. That really is my point, that the average human tolerance for danger is much higher than a few in a million. People who fear things with odds that low are being irrational.
Shark attacks is actually a great example of media induced hysteria. Even if you swim in the ocean every day and therefore have orders of magnitude more risk, that elevated level of risk is still small. Fear of sharks was largely induced by the sensational horror movie Jaws and is occasionally reinforced by profit-motivated newspapers signal-boosting rare attacks; it's not a rational reaction to the actual level of risk involved. 20% of Australians supporting senseless shark culls seems very comparable to the antivaxxerism. The other 80% have a more appropriate attitude towards risk.
- cgriswald 6y agoWe've already established their irrationality. They're more afraid of a 3-in-a-million chance of something versus a 5000-in-a-million chance of the same thing via a passive path. The question is why. I do agree that social media can amplify the effect, but so can two people who share the same fear sitting in the same room. How did those two people get that fear in the first place?