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I'm not quite sure that was fearmongering, so much as people operating from limited information. It's reasonable that people will make mistakes.
by woofie11 6y ago
I'm not quite sure that was fearmongering, so much as people operating from limited information. It's reasonable that people will make mistakes.
- umvi 6y agoWell it seems like the prevailing emotion in times of limited information is fear. You see dire forecasts that embody people's worst fears prefixed with probability qualifiers. The same has happened many times in the past (and is still happening now) with Covid, climate change, upcoming election, etc. It is reasonable people will make mistakes, lots of them, so let's stop prefixing predictions with probability qualifiers "it's very likely X will happen" as if our limited information is enough to quantify a probability % of liklihood. I've seen dozens of "very likely" predictions on HN fall flat once more information came out within the past few years alone.
- woofie11 6y agoFear is a good reaction to limited information! If COVID19 has a 15% chance of leading to a million people on long-term disability, that justifies a lot of precautions. You can phrase that as a mathematical equation, where you sum up the outcomes, average, and get an expected value, or as an emotion. In this case, the outcome is the same. Ditto for climate change. I agree the worst-case is unlikely, and people get ahead by presenting the worst-case, but "unlikely" means 10%, not 0%. In the grand scheme of things, switching to sustainable technologies isn't too expensive. And things with 15% odds will fall flat 5 times out of 6. I think the bigger problem we have is an inability to move. We should have dealt with COVID19 when it first appeared. We should be doing a lot more to deal with climate change. And so on. Problem-solving is the best way to mitigate fear.