I swear human brains are programmed to have a "fear bank" of things to be scared of, and an allocation of fear that must be spent on items in the fear bank.

As society has weeded out all the things to fear over time, more and more far flung things get put into the bank, and more and more fear is allocated to the dwindling amount of things to be scared of.

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x-complexity 2 days ago | parent [-]

Following this hypothesis, it would be rationally beneficial to release a wild bear every 6 months or so, just to make sure that the 'fear bank' is occupied by things that warrant actual fear.

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DangitBobby 2 days ago | parent [-]

We do have this whole global climate crisis going on. Maybe people could try being afraid of that

	▲	x-complexity 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> We do have this whole global climate crisis going on. Maybe people could try being afraid of that It's too conceptually big for some people to put into the 'fear bank' to be relied upon. For the threat to be near-universally relied upon, it needs to: (a) have a physical presence, and (b) be within 2 orders of magnitude of size to trigger physical alertness (tick -> herd of elephants), but also (c) not be (immediately dangerous/lethal that the only solution is to never meet it)