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Comment by solid_fuel | Hacker News Reader

The comparison to social media is an apt one. I have been told directly, by relatives, that the city I live in was burned to the ground by protests in 2020. Nevermind that I told them that wasn't true, never mind that I sent pictures of the neighborhood still very much being fine. They are convinced because everyone they follow on facebook repeats the same thing.

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This is an example that supports Scott's point that people don't have world models. The people who "believe" this don't wonder how stock market continues to operate now that NYC is a wreck. Etc.

I wonder in what sense they really do "believe". If they had a strong practical reason to go to a big city, what would they do?

I'm not sure that you can reach the conclusion that "people don't have world models" based on beliefs that do not fully integrate with such a model. We too often try to misapply binary truth requirements to domains in which there exists at least a trinary logic, if not a greater number of logic truths.

If I meet a random stranger, do I trust them or distrust them? The answer is "both/neither," because a concept such as "trust" isn't a binary logic in such a circumstance. They are neither trustworthy nor untrustworthy, they are in a state of nontrustworthiness (the absence of trust, but not the opposite of truth).

World models tend to have foundational principles/truths that inform what can be compatible for inclusion. A belief that is non-compatible, rather than compatible/incompatible, can exist in such a model (often weakly) since it does not meet the requirements for rejection. Incomplete information can be integrated into a world model as long as the aspects being evaluated for compatibility conform to the model.

Requiring a world model to contain complete information and logical consistency at all possible levels from the granular to the metaphysical seems to be one Hell of a high bar that makes demands no other system is expected to achieve.

I'm often reminded of this gallup poll:

> How worried are you that you or someone in your family will become a victim of terrorism -- very worried, somewhat worried, not too worried or not worried at all?

It averages around 35-40% very or somewhat worried.

Most people's worries and anxieties are really misaligned with statistical likelihood.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/4909/terrorism-united-states.as...

Being worried is different from it actually happening though. If we started executing 10% of the population each year, I think more than 10% of the people would be worried they're next.

At a random 10% everyone could and should be worried that they'd be in the next 10%. That's 10% chance of being executed per year! That's really bad!

It's not at all similar to a _rare_ phenomenon, or at least it _shouldn't_ be, but some people are inclined to treat very fringe risks (or at least some very fringe risks; there are likely more people worried about being killed by terrorism than food poisoning, say) as very great risks.

That's a pretty... strange example? 10% is fairly large odds that you'll be in the next batch, certainly high enough to cause worry. I would quite rationally shy away from any activity that gave me a 10% chance of death doing it.

The idea that 35+% of people are worried that they'll be the victim of terrorism is something that we should be worried about (heh). It suggests that people's risk assessment is completely unrelated to reality. I am as close to 0% worried as I could be that I'll be a victim of terrorism. Thinking otherwise is laughable. There are plenty of actually real things to be worried about...

I've recently learned about Tuchman's law after I bought her A Distant Mirror at a booksale

>Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_W._Tuchman#cite_note-M...

I've seen people on this site comment that. The desire to live in fear is a strong one.

It's sort of a symptom of our poor mechanisms to create signalling and movement. We evolved to operate at the level of troops of baboons and, without utilizing the more potent capabilities of the trained mined, those mechanisms fail at the internet scale.

People often "believe" things as a means of signalling others. Deeply held "beliefs" tell us where the troop will go. Using these extremely compact signals helps the group focus through the chaos and arrive at a fast consensus on new decisions. When a question comes up, a few people shout their beliefs. We take the temperature of the room, some voices are more common than others, and a direction becomes apparent. It's like Monte Carlo sampling the centroid and applying some reduction.

This means of consensus is wildly illogical, but slower, logical discussion takes time that baboons on the move don't have. It's a simple information and communication efficiency problem. We can't contextualize everything, and contextualizing is often itself a means of intense dishonesty through choosing the framing, which leads to intense debate and more time.

Efficiency and the prominently visible preservation of each one's interests in the means of consensus are vital. I don't think we have reached anything near optimum and certainly not anything designed for internet scale. As a result, the mind of the internet is not really near its potential.

If I compare how fearful people are and how many bad things have happened historically, I don't think the amount of fear is unreasonable. However it can certainly be said that people fear the wrong things - worrying about perfectly safe things, while being blind to the silent danger sneaking up on them.

I commented about the desire, not the degree. Fearing that blue cities are being razed indictates a desire to be kept in fear. Fearing something legitimate the same amount is normal.

> If I compare how fearful people are and how many bad things have happened historically, I don't think the amount of fear is unreasonable.

I disagree, and I think this is a very strange way to think about it. Yes, bad things happen all the time, but the absolute number of them in history has very little to do with the risk that anything is going to happen to you, personally, in the future.

Well what I was talking about was whether there is a bias for fear. And so to see whether that is true you have to compare fear levels to actual risks and see if they are disproportionate or not. If bad things are always happening and people are never afraid it's fair to say they aren't afraid enough. If bad things never happen but people are always afraid then it's fair to say they are too afraid. I don't think either of these are the case though.

This sort of thing has become more ambiguous with "conspiracy theories" becoming brought into mainstream politics in the US. It's never clear if they actually believe it, or they're sort of cheerleading for their political cause.

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