p. 118 –123
The final few pages on the topic of the fear instinct focus on terrorism. First, terrorism is an exception to the global trends discussed earlier in the book, which means it has gone up over the past decade. To be more precise, it has increased on all income levels except on level 4, the richest countries.
The author mentions the example of deaths caused by alcoholism along with the terrorist event example to showcase the damage the fear instinct can do in someone’s thinking. The risk of dying in the United States as an indirect victim of alcoholism, for example being in a car accident, is higher than dying as a victim of a terrorist act. Nevertheless, terrorist events receive more news coverage and the public fears such an event as much as other more likely to happen events.
My only first-thought objection while reading this was that perhaps that’s not the only reason why the fear of a terrorist attack is high. What if most people are just more used to the idea that car accidents—for many reasons including alcoholism—happen? What if it is a generally accepted risk? What if not only it is an accepted risk, but most people believe they can avoid it if they are excellent, super careful drivers? Whether that belief is right or wrong doesn’t matter. Most drivers believe they can handle a car, how many believe they could handle someone with a bomb?
Even if there’s a sliver of truth to the thought that we may just be more used to car accidents than terrorism, then we need to pay attention not just to the fear instinct and how it influences us, but to how and why negative events become just another part of our lives.
As an aside, on page 119, the author talks about an experiment they did to check whether Wikipedia was a reliable source as an up-to-date terrorist events database. It wasn’t, or it was, but only when it came to data about the West. A first thought that came to mind when reading about this was whether a reliable database could be assembled using Twitter data. Certainly using online sources an AI could use independent verification methods and build such a database, right? That’s probably true of all data.
On that topic, I recently watched a webinar with Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil, where Ray Kurzweil described how managing to use realistic simulations of real-world scenarios (like driving) can provide an AI with sufficient data to learn a lot faster and a lot better. Simulations are already used for training to deal with and for predicting natural disasters effects, so it does make you wonder about the result of using AI in that way to everything that can be used for and not simply for drug discovery or autonomous driving.
One final note on the fear instinct comes from page 123 and it is about assessing risk. The author asks you to consider two things: first, the danger something poses and second, your exposure to it.
The Spur of the Moment Guide to FACTFULNESS is a series of posts of first thoughts while reading the book FACTFULNESS by Hans Rosling (this is an affiliate link).
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Week 20