Small hypothesis that I’m not very confident of at all but is worth mentioning because I’ve seen it surfaced by others:
“We live in the safest era in human history, yet we’re more terrified of death than ever before.”
What if these things are related? Everyone talks about kids being kept in smaller and smaller ranges despite child safety never higher, but what if keeping kids in a smaller range is what causes their greater safety?
Like I said, I don’t fully believe this. One counterargument is that survivorship bias shouldn’t apply here—even if people in the past died much more often from preventable safety-related things like accidents or kidnappings, their friends and family would remain to report their demise to the world. In other words, if free-roaming was really as risky as we think it is, there should be tons of stories of it from the past, and I don’t tend to see as many.
(although maybe comment threads I read on the matter select for happy stories on free-roaming as a kid in the 80s and select against sad ones, I dunno)
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).
Small hypothesis that I’m not very confident of at all but is worth mentioning because I’ve seen it surfaced by others:
“We live in the safest era in human history, yet we’re more terrified of death than ever before.”
What if these things are related? Everyone talks about kids being kept in smaller and smaller ranges despite child safety never higher, but what if keeping kids in a smaller range is what causes their greater safety?
Like I said, I don’t fully believe this. One counterargument is that survivorship bias shouldn’t apply here—even if people in the past died much more often from preventable safety-related things like accidents or kidnappings, their friends and family would remain to report their demise to the world. In other words, if free-roaming was really as risky as we think it is, there should be tons of stories of it from the past, and I don’t tend to see as many.
(although maybe comment threads I read on the matter select for happy stories on free-roaming as a kid in the 80s and select against sad ones, I dunno)
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).