AndrewH comments on Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms - Less Wrong

12 [deleted] 12 July 2009 09:26AM

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Comment author: AndrewH 12 July 2009 05:24:31PM 5 points [-]

An important consideration not yet mentioned is that risk mitigation is can be difficult to quantify, compared to disaster relief efforts where if you save a house fill of children, you become a hero. Coupled with the fact that people extrapolate the future using the past (which misses all existential risks), the incentive to do anything about it drops pretty much to nil.