this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
465 points (96.4% liked)
Technology
59168 readers
2113 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.