Discussions
Reply to: Worried about the fall season Posted October 17, 2020

While I agree with you that there is more to worry about than usual this year, it is worth reminding ourselves that our minds work against us in times like this. In particular, a few things that sabotage our thinking: The availability heuristic: We tend to judge current and future events based on recent knowledge or experience. Also, the easier it is to recall something, the larger we assume the risks of it are. In other words, recent experience and information will loom large in our minds, influencing our ability to perceive risk. A recent brush with COVID, unemployment or civil unrest will have you mentally primed to see it as a certainty in the near future. Thanks to the amygdala, our brains are hard-wired to react quickly to negative information, and to be on the lookout for potential threats to our safety. Physical threats to safety have diminished over time. Assuming you don’t live in a war-torn country, the average person is safer now than at any other point in history. But your amygdala is still hard at work, looking for threats in the information you consume- which in modern times, is overwhelmingly biased towards the negative. News media is tuned to ignore stories of progress in favor of crisis and chaos, because it attracts readers and revenue. As the saying goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” A global information network also means that you are exposed to all of the worlds’s problems, causing faraway crises to feel like they are happening in your backyard. The above two biases will conspire to give you the impression that things can only get worse, especially in the wake of recent hardship and turbulence. That doesn’t mean the worst is behind us of course; I think that the next year or two will be rocky until an effective vaccine is widely-distributed. My inner prepper always keeps Murphy’s Law in mind, but I think it is missing an important addendum: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong… but rarely all at once.“

Reply to: Worried about the fall season Posted October 17, 2020
Reply to: What three firearms would you have for prepping? Posted October 17, 2020
Reply to: Prepping for self-managed abortion post-Roe v. Wade Posted October 16, 2020
Reply to: What’s the best prepping advice you have ever received? Posted October 16, 2020

This is an investment quote, but I think the mindset applies to prepping in general: “The stock market has predicted nine of the past five recessions.” If you dabble in preparedness-related circles for a while, you will likely pick up on a general narrative that bubbles to the surface every so often: Society has been going downhill for decades, and the “the big one” is just around the corner. [insert expert here] has been sounding the alarm bells, and [insert incident] is the first domino to fall. Prep now, before it’s too late! Of course, “the big one” changes depending on the year and who your talk to… but the sense of urgency and desperation is the same. This year, it’s Coronavirus and post-election unrest; at other times the crisis is hyperinflation, market crashes, Y2K, Climate Change, etc. In reality though, if you look through the long lens of history, society is better off now than it ever has been- by almost every objective measure you can think of. The trick is that bad news tends to be sudden, dramatic, and it gets increasingly more coverage from news media… while good news tends to be slow, incremental, and easily overlooked or taken for granted. For example, we are ~90% less likely to be killed by a natural disaster than we were 100 years ago, and global rates of poverty, hunger, etc have been plummeting over the past century. That’s not to say that progress is guaranteed, or that crises and setbacks don’t happen (or why else are we reading these sites?) But when we are awash in news about the next crisis around the corner, it is easy to slip into a sense of panic, worry, or even fatalism. But predictions of impending doom fly in the face of 100 years of data to the contrary- and the popular doomsday prophets are almost never held to task for their incorrect predictions.

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Reply to: Worried about the fall season Posted October 17, 2020

While I agree with you that there is more to worry about than usual this year, it is worth reminding ourselves that our minds work against us in times like this. In particular, a few things that sabotage our thinking: The availability heuristic: We tend to judge current and future events based on recent knowledge or experience. Also, the easier it is to recall something, the larger we assume the risks of it are. In other words, recent experience and information will loom large in our minds, influencing our ability to perceive risk. A recent brush with COVID, unemployment or civil unrest will have you mentally primed to see it as a certainty in the near future. Thanks to the amygdala, our brains are hard-wired to react quickly to negative information, and to be on the lookout for potential threats to our safety. Physical threats to safety have diminished over time. Assuming you don’t live in a war-torn country, the average person is safer now than at any other point in history. But your amygdala is still hard at work, looking for threats in the information you consume- which in modern times, is overwhelmingly biased towards the negative. News media is tuned to ignore stories of progress in favor of crisis and chaos, because it attracts readers and revenue. As the saying goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” A global information network also means that you are exposed to all of the worlds’s problems, causing faraway crises to feel like they are happening in your backyard. The above two biases will conspire to give you the impression that things can only get worse, especially in the wake of recent hardship and turbulence. That doesn’t mean the worst is behind us of course; I think that the next year or two will be rocky until an effective vaccine is widely-distributed. My inner prepper always keeps Murphy’s Law in mind, but I think it is missing an important addendum: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong… but rarely all at once.“

Reply to: Worried about the fall season Posted October 17, 2020
Reply to: What three firearms would you have for prepping? Posted October 17, 2020
Reply to: Prepping for self-managed abortion post-Roe v. Wade Posted October 16, 2020
Reply to: What’s the best prepping advice you have ever received? Posted October 16, 2020

This is an investment quote, but I think the mindset applies to prepping in general: “The stock market has predicted nine of the past five recessions.” If you dabble in preparedness-related circles for a while, you will likely pick up on a general narrative that bubbles to the surface every so often: Society has been going downhill for decades, and the “the big one” is just around the corner. [insert expert here] has been sounding the alarm bells, and [insert incident] is the first domino to fall. Prep now, before it’s too late! Of course, “the big one” changes depending on the year and who your talk to… but the sense of urgency and desperation is the same. This year, it’s Coronavirus and post-election unrest; at other times the crisis is hyperinflation, market crashes, Y2K, Climate Change, etc. In reality though, if you look through the long lens of history, society is better off now than it ever has been- by almost every objective measure you can think of. The trick is that bad news tends to be sudden, dramatic, and it gets increasingly more coverage from news media… while good news tends to be slow, incremental, and easily overlooked or taken for granted. For example, we are ~90% less likely to be killed by a natural disaster than we were 100 years ago, and global rates of poverty, hunger, etc have been plummeting over the past century. That’s not to say that progress is guaranteed, or that crises and setbacks don’t happen (or why else are we reading these sites?) But when we are awash in news about the next crisis around the corner, it is easy to slip into a sense of panic, worry, or even fatalism. But predictions of impending doom fly in the face of 100 years of data to the contrary- and the popular doomsday prophets are almost never held to task for their incorrect predictions.