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> Let's take a minute to remember that our brains are shaped, by millions of years of evolution, to model existential threats and act accordingly. I would say t

by taffer 6y ago

> Let's take a minute to remember that our brains are shaped, by millions of years of evolution, to model existential threats and act accordingly. I would say that what we deem "imaginable" is a pretty good proxy to what is "probable", especially in the long run. It is not a good proxy at all. The environment in which we lived for millions of years does not correspond well to our modern civilization. Being killed by a member of another tribe was a likely event for most of human and animal history. Today, being killed by a toaster is many orders of magnitude more likely than being killed by a terrorist. Yet many people fear terrorists, while no one fears toasters.

tompccs 6y ago
The number of people killed in a year by toasters never deviates more than a couple of standard deviations from the mean. The number of people killed by terrorists in history could be exceeded in a single event. Likewise, at the beginning of the pandemic nobody had been killed by COVID-19 - were you making your toaster argument then too?
542354234235 6y ago
> The environment in which we lived for millions of years does not correspond well to our modern civilization. Who would have thought that a brain evolved by taking in and balancing things based on interacting with a couple hundred other members of their species and maybe a 100 miles in any given direction wouldn't be very good when taking in information from billions of other people and millions of miles of territory.
kritiko 6y ago
>Today, being killed by a toaster is many orders of magnitude more likely than being killed by a terrorist. I don't think this is true. Googling it, it seems to originate from the claim "you should be more scared of toasters than sharks" based on the number of toaster deaths (source of this data is unclear - Fermi estimate?) The only data I could find cites 21 deaths in the US in 2000 from "countertop cooking." By comparison, there were 211 mass shooting deaths in the US in 2019 per Northeastern University. https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/hazard_housewares.pdf https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/hazard_housewares.pdf

by taffer 6y ago

tompccs 6y ago

The number of people killed in a year by toasters never deviates more than a couple of standard deviations from the mean. The number of people killed by terrorists in history could be exceeded in a single event. Likewise, at the beginning of the pandemic nobody had been killed by COVID-19 - were you making your toaster argument then too?

542354234235 6y ago

> The environment in which we lived for millions of years does not correspond well to our modern civilization. Who would have thought that a brain evolved by taking in and balancing things based on interacting with a couple hundred other members of their species and maybe a 100 miles in any given direction wouldn't be very good when taking in information from billions of other people and millions of miles of territory.

kritiko 6y ago

>Today, being killed by a toaster is many orders of magnitude more likely than being killed by a terrorist. I don't think this is true. Googling it, it seems to originate from the claim "you should be more scared of toasters than sharks" based on the number of toaster deaths (source of this data is unclear - Fermi estimate?) The only data I could find cites 21 deaths in the US in 2000 from "countertop cooking." By comparison, there were 211 mass shooting deaths in the US in 2019 per Northeastern University. https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/hazard_housewares.pdf https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/hazard_housewares.pdf