Abstract instances of the crab-boiling effect can arise from changes that are above the sensory threshold. All that’s necessary is for acclimatization to outpace innovation. Each individual step (and these abstract instances are often stepwise rather than continuous) can still register as weird, but if you get used to it before the next step happens, your ‘weirdness threshold’ doesn’t continuously increase.
We’ve all seen Back to the Future, right? In 1955, Ronald Reagan was a supporting actor who’d just become the host of something called “General Electric Theater”. His only political experience was as a former president of the Screen Actors Guild, and he wasn’t even a Republican yet. The progression from there wasn’t terribly weird: he quit working for GE to become more politically involved, campaigned against Medicare in 1961 and for Goldwater in 1964, boosted his profile enough on the Goldwater campaign that he ran for governor of California and won, tried to primary Gerald Ford and lost, and won against Carter in 1980.
Reagan’s rise to the presidency is stepwise, and each step is above the sensory threshold, but you still get the crab-boiling effect in the end.
Abstract instances of the crab-boiling effect can arise from changes that are above the sensory threshold. All that’s necessary is for acclimatization to outpace innovation. Each individual step (and these abstract instances are often stepwise rather than continuous) can still register as weird, but if you get used to it before the next step happens, your ‘weirdness threshold’ doesn’t continuously increase.
We’ve all seen Back to the Future, right? In 1955, Ronald Reagan was a supporting actor who’d just become the host of something called “General Electric Theater”. His only political experience was as a former president of the Screen Actors Guild, and he wasn’t even a Republican yet. The progression from there wasn’t terribly weird: he quit working for GE to become more politically involved, campaigned against Medicare in 1961 and for Goldwater in 1964, boosted his profile enough on the Goldwater campaign that he ran for governor of California and won, tried to primary Gerald Ford and lost, and won against Carter in 1980.
Reagan’s rise to the presidency is stepwise, and each step is above the sensory threshold, but you still get the crab-boiling effect in the end.