I do think there’s something real to it. I agree that having less laissez faire childrearing practices probably directly resulted in a lower childhood accidental death rate. The main thesis of the most is that people care a lot more about living longer than they used to, and take much stronger efforts to avoid death than they used to. So things that look like irrational risk-aversion compared to historical practices are actually a rational side-effect of having greater premium of life and making (intuitively/on average/at scale) rational cost-benefits analyses that gave different answers than the past.
Another interesting subtlety the post discusses is that while the intro sets up “We live in the safest era in human history, yet we’re more terrified of death than ever before,” there’s a plausible case for causality in the other direction. That is, it’s possible that because we live in a safe era, we err more on the side of avoiding death.
(btw this post refreshed on me like 5 times while making this comment so it took a lot more effort to type out than i’m accustomed to, unclear if it’s a client-side issue or a problem with LW).
I do think there’s something real to it. I agree that having less laissez faire childrearing practices probably directly resulted in a lower childhood accidental death rate. The main thesis of the most is that people care a lot more about living longer than they used to, and take much stronger efforts to avoid death than they used to. So things that look like irrational risk-aversion compared to historical practices are actually a rational side-effect of having greater premium of life and making (intuitively/on average/at scale) rational cost-benefits analyses that gave different answers than the past.
Another interesting subtlety the post discusses is that while the intro sets up “We live in the safest era in human history, yet we’re more terrified of death than ever before,” there’s a plausible case for causality in the other direction. That is, it’s possible that because we live in a safe era, we err more on the side of avoiding death.
Oh, definitely, I truly think this is most of the explanation, but was curious how much the other direction contributed.
Yeah it’s something I don’t want to do a deep-dive in, but if you do, happy to read and signal-boost it!
(btw this post refreshed on me like 5 times while making this comment so it took a lot more effort to type out than i’m accustomed to, unclear if it’s a client-side issue or a problem with LW).