Agreed. Honestly this feels like one of those Bell curve memes, where most people would know perfectly well at a gut level what “safe” means, then rationalists tried being disruptive and provocative by suggesting a seeming deviation from common sense (“you are actually always unsafe!”), and then we get the explanation in rationalist terms of precisely what other people instinctively do when deciding whether to feel safe or unsafe.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing: examining your unconscious assumptions and elevating them to the conscious level is good!
Nor do I necessarily agree with the average risk level that people seem to consider as safe. I was particularly frustrated by how COVID was declared solved essentially not by lowering the risk past what the most obvious measure (the vaccine) could do, but by raising the risk tolerance of everyone via shaming and peer pressure (roughly speaking, calling everyone who didn’t go along with it a boring party pooper). But disagreement on the specific level of course doesn’t change the fact that there has to be a level. I can’t be at all times as aware and on high readiness as I would be if I was being stalked by a psycho axe murderer, or my worst enemy would neither be COVID nor the axe murderer: it would be the inevitable aneurysm or heart attack I’d get out of sheer stress.
Agreed. Honestly this feels like one of those Bell curve memes, where most people would know perfectly well at a gut level what “safe” means, then rationalists tried being disruptive and provocative by suggesting a seeming deviation from common sense (“you are actually always unsafe!”), and then we get the explanation in rationalist terms of precisely what other people instinctively do when deciding whether to feel safe or unsafe.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing: examining your unconscious assumptions and elevating them to the conscious level is good!
Nor do I necessarily agree with the average risk level that people seem to consider as safe. I was particularly frustrated by how COVID was declared solved essentially not by lowering the risk past what the most obvious measure (the vaccine) could do, but by raising the risk tolerance of everyone via shaming and peer pressure (roughly speaking, calling everyone who didn’t go along with it a boring party pooper). But disagreement on the specific level of course doesn’t change the fact that there has to be a level. I can’t be at all times as aware and on high readiness as I would be if I was being stalked by a psycho axe murderer, or my worst enemy would neither be COVID nor the axe murderer: it would be the inevitable aneurysm or heart attack I’d get out of sheer stress.