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I think a lot of healthy life choices stem from proper risk management and cost-benefit analysis, which humans can do on their own fairly well for normal life t

I think a lot of healthy life choices stem from proper risk management and cost-benefit analysis, which humans can do on their own fairly well for normal life tasks. For instance, there's a non-zero chance you could lose your life every time you get into a car. However, almost everybody still hops into cars because the chance of a life-altering accident (if the driver not drinking and/or driving like a maniac) is relatively low and the benefits to cars in your life are high. Where I think this ability for normal people to make sensible choices gets warped is when the media's business model of driving emotional and catchy stories interferes with peoples' actual perceptions of risk. For example, there are healthy young people still utterly scared to death of Covid because their preferred media tells them to be afraid. You can apply this to almost any hot button issue that the media has adopted and find people who have had their sense of the actual risk warped.

cyberbanjo 4y ago
Getting into a car isn't the dangerous part where I live, it's being near the road. It's safer to be in a car, near the road, than on foot or on bicycle.
- munk-a 4y ago
  Both actions are dangerous - and it's the presence of cars that makes it dangerous. In the US 42,915 lives were lost in automobile crashes[1] in 2021. 1. https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-traffic-fatalities https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    You and the poster you're responding to seem to be using a different definition of the word dangerous: the one above seems to be using more of the connotation of the word (point out that there's an acceptable level of risk involved with cars) and you're using the denotation (pointing out that people do die in cars). To be clear, virtually every human activity is technically dangerous and there's a non-zero risk in almost any human activity. By the dictionary definition, owning a pool is technically dangerous because people drown and get hurt all of the time. Hell, a bucket causes a non-zero number of drowning deaths. People can die from blender accidents or shitting too hard or swallowing quarters or tripping to death on a power cord. Everything is technically dangerous.
LeifCarrotson 4y ago
I think it's a stretch to say that humans can do fairly well at risk management and cost-benefit analyses; humans are deeply irrational creatures who can do some math but whose subconscious prefers to conserve calories and work with simple, easy to understand absolutes. Almost no one is punching in the numbers on their risk profile, checking, hm, 2.5 million injuries per year, 35,000 fatalities per year, 15,000 miles driven, advantages of independent mobility, how much will this trip to hang out with Jim affect my overall quality of life... No, they're assuming "I'm a good driver, I actually have quick reflexes and a safe car, nothing's going to happen". Or they're assuming that the roads are a jungle and you're almost certain to get into a crash eventually, holding negative primals about the safety of car-oriented culture. Likewise, I suspect that some of the negative outcomes described in the article: > As much as we hope the dangerous-world belief will help our kids, the evidence indicates that it does exactly the opposite. In the same paper, Clifton and Meindl show that people holding negative primals are less healthy than their peers, more often sad, more likely to be depressed, and less satisfied with their lives. They also tend to dislike their jobs and perform worse than their more positive counterparts. are more appropriate given the reality of the situation. What if your job - statistically, you're probably pushing data from one silo to another to help add another decimal place to some executive's net worth - is not actually likeable? Would you rather plaster an ignorant smile to your face and be proud of your attention to detail on those TPS reports, and happy that IT brought you a new, slightly larger monitor? Perhaps you'd call yourself depressed or sad when you consider the probable state of the global climate at your eventual retirement date (if you ever get a retirement date, that assumes social security still exists, your company doesn't discharge your pension through bankruptcy, and your investments outperform rabid inflation rates).
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > I think it's a stretch to say that humans can do fairly well at risk management and cost-benefit analyses; My stated caveat is that risk assessment works "fairly well for normal life tasks". People decide to travel in cars and fly and do all sorts of things involving non-zero risk and make fairly reasonable decisions. It's once media influence arrives (Covid!, climate change!, guns!, etc) that peoples' perceptions about actual risk for hot button issues can be warped.

cyberbanjo 4y ago

Getting into a car isn't the dangerous part where I live, it's being near the road. It's safer to be in a car, near the road, than on foot or on bicycle.

munk-a 4y ago
Both actions are dangerous - and it's the presence of cars that makes it dangerous. In the US 42,915 lives were lost in automobile crashes[1] in 2021. 1. https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-traffic-fatalities https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  You and the poster you're responding to seem to be using a different definition of the word dangerous: the one above seems to be using more of the connotation of the word (point out that there's an acceptable level of risk involved with cars) and you're using the denotation (pointing out that people do die in cars). To be clear, virtually every human activity is technically dangerous and there's a non-zero risk in almost any human activity. By the dictionary definition, owning a pool is technically dangerous because people drown and get hurt all of the time. Hell, a bucket causes a non-zero number of drowning deaths. People can die from blender accidents or shitting too hard or swallowing quarters or tripping to death on a power cord. Everything is technically dangerous.

LeifCarrotson 4y ago

I think it's a stretch to say that humans can do fairly well at risk management and cost-benefit analyses; humans are deeply irrational creatures who can do some math but whose subconscious prefers to conserve calories and work with simple, easy to understand absolutes. Almost no one is punching in the numbers on their risk profile, checking, hm, 2.5 million injuries per year, 35,000 fatalities per year, 15,000 miles driven, advantages of independent mobility, how much will this trip to hang out with Jim affect my overall quality of life... No, they're assuming "I'm a good driver, I actually have quick reflexes and a safe car, nothing's going to happen". Or they're assuming that the roads are a jungle and you're almost certain to get into a crash eventually, holding negative primals about the safety of car-oriented culture. Likewise, I suspect that some of the negative outcomes described in the article: > As much as we hope the dangerous-world belief will help our kids, the evidence indicates that it does exactly the opposite. In the same paper, Clifton and Meindl show that people holding negative primals are less healthy than their peers, more often sad, more likely to be depressed, and less satisfied with their lives. They also tend to dislike their jobs and perform worse than their more positive counterparts. are more appropriate given the reality of the situation. What if your job - statistically, you're probably pushing data from one silo to another to help add another decimal place to some executive's net worth - is not actually likeable? Would you rather plaster an ignorant smile to your face and be proud of your attention to detail on those TPS reports, and happy that IT brought you a new, slightly larger monitor? Perhaps you'd call yourself depressed or sad when you consider the probable state of the global climate at your eventual retirement date (if you ever get a retirement date, that assumes social security still exists, your company doesn't discharge your pension through bankruptcy, and your investments outperform rabid inflation rates).

logicalmonster 4y ago
> I think it's a stretch to say that humans can do fairly well at risk management and cost-benefit analyses; My stated caveat is that risk assessment works "fairly well for normal life tasks". People decide to travel in cars and fly and do all sorts of things involving non-zero risk and make fairly reasonable decisions. It's once media influence arrives (Covid!, climate change!, guns!, etc) that peoples' perceptions about actual risk for hot button issues can be warped.