Never say never.
There are cases where it's happened, but admittedly it's super rare.
There are cases where it's happened, but admittedly it's super rare.
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Our society is one of the safest in the history of the world, and also one of the most paranoid in the history of the world. It's intuitive, but at the same time seems like a paradox: Why would we worry so much more when the risk of something happening is so much less?
I think it comes down to those incredible predictive brains we have. We have the world that is that we react to, then we have the world we predict that we can react to ahead of time. For those predictions to be acted upon, we need to consider the future more strongly than the present, or we'll just act on the present reducing the benefit of our predictive brains. As for how this happens, if we predict all the pain that a bad outcome would have, we can predict all that pain in a second, whereas if we experience that pain, it will be drawn out over a period of time.
That's how we end up with our overdeveloped sense of empathy as well. We care think about all the bad feelings of someone being mean to us in an instant instead of it being actually felt over a period of time.
The fact that we don't actually get hurt only makes things worse, because we continue to build and build and build how bad pain must be in our minds, anticipating a slap that will never come and becoming more terrified of it every moment. Meanwhile, 100 years ago kids dying was commonplace yet people just had more kids and were significantly less risk averse with each one.
It's almost like a reverse skinner box, the low random chance of pain causing us to go crazy like the low random chance of pleasure does.
I think it comes down to those incredible predictive brains we have. We have the world that is that we react to, then we have the world we predict that we can react to ahead of time. For those predictions to be acted upon, we need to consider the future more strongly than the present, or we'll just act on the present reducing the benefit of our predictive brains. As for how this happens, if we predict all the pain that a bad outcome would have, we can predict all that pain in a second, whereas if we experience that pain, it will be drawn out over a period of time.
That's how we end up with our overdeveloped sense of empathy as well. We care think about all the bad feelings of someone being mean to us in an instant instead of it being actually felt over a period of time.
The fact that we don't actually get hurt only makes things worse, because we continue to build and build and build how bad pain must be in our minds, anticipating a slap that will never come and becoming more terrified of it every moment. Meanwhile, 100 years ago kids dying was commonplace yet people just had more kids and were significantly less risk averse with each one.
It's almost like a reverse skinner box, the low random chance of pain causing us to go crazy like the low random chance of pleasure does.