[extropy-chat] Psychology of investments in infrastructure

Russell Wallace russell.wallace at gmail.com
Mon Jun 19 16:54:36 UTC 2006


On 6/19/06, spike <spike66 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Ja we cannot reasonably guard against all possible attacks, but we can
> invest according to our best estimate of risk.  I am suggesting that
> vulnerable stuff like subways are a bad investment with current
> technology.
>

This is ridiculous. What are you going to do, let fear of terrorism convince
you to start driving to work instead of taking the subway? How many people
have terrorists killed in the last few years? A handful of thousands. How
many people have road accidents killed in the last few years? Hundreds of
thousands.

Our Cro-Magnon brains are programmed to respond emotionally to violent
deaths out of all proportion to their actual numbers; we can't help that.
But now that we know the reason for this programming, we know why the
reaction is irrational in today's world and in this case we even have hard
data directing us to the correct conclusion, we can refrain from letting our
programming dictate a self-destructive course of action. Come on, Spike, you
know all this. Extropy-chat is a list for rationalists, and rationality is
about letting our beliefs and actions be dictated by reality.
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