this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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I think it's the (seeming) paradox of the information age. Visibility on issues increasing has made things seem more dangerous, even when in reality they've gotten safer.
To put it mathematically, if we see only half the failures with a 10% failure rate, we perceive a 5% fail rate. But if we see every failure for a 7% failure rate, we perceive a 7% fail rate, and it looks worse even though it's actually better.
Totally true. I read some interesting research some years ago, which I can’t find now of course, that people who speak smaller languages (ie with less global speaking population) feel safer because they simply aren’t exposed to as many bad things happening in their own language. So when a plane crashes in the US, UK people feel more impacted from it because they can see victims and relatives speaking about it in a language that feels like their home language. Though to people in Denmark that crash was “abroad”, so “nothing I need to worry about; it was far from home”.
“Near” is people who speak your language. “Far away” is people who don’t.