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Matt_Duing comments on Humans are not automatically strategic - Less Wrong
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Disease, motor vehicles, and humans are very dangerous. Currently, everyone dies eventually(1), and almost everyone who dies is killed by one of these three things. The CDC has charts about this. See 10 Leading Causes of Death by Age Group, United States – 2007. Boxes that aren't one of the Big Three Of Doom are extremely rare. This chart breaks down the unintentional injuries. As you can see, motor vehicles dominate. I was surprised at first that "Unintentional Poisoning" came in second, especially among the 35-54 age group, then I realized that it's probably drug overdoses, not people thinking that vitamins are candy. After that, it's Unintentional Fall among older people(2).
Do people fear the wrong diseases, wrong motor vehicles, and wrong humans? Sure. But at least the categories are correct.
I suggest "plane crashes".
As for the rest of the post, which is asking very good questions, when I became a programmer I started with (c) "Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;", bootstrapped up to skill and power, and then figured out what goals I could achieve with it. (In no particular order, improving the state of the art at my employer and the field as a whole, working on my projects at home, and funding my retirement.) I consciously decided to teach myself a real programming language (the wrong one, although it worked out in the end), but I didn't have to mess with my reward gradients or motivational systems. At most, I had to throw away mini-goals that were interesting at the time, but later became trivial or pointless. For me, learning how to do neat stuff was its own reward and its own motivation. After I worked my way out of the depths of newbie confusion, I realized that I could work on problems that previously, or to anyone else, would have seemed like a terrible slog. (My work and hobbies involve staring at angle brackets all day, and not the HTML kind.)
I don't know if that can work for anyone else. It's just my data point.
I agree plane crash concerns are generally more irrational. But I mean... take me, for example. I know plane crashes and sharks are mostly negligible while car accidents and humans present larger risks; that much information reached me be accident. But, even though I regularly go out of my way to "reduce my risk from car accidents", I haven't ever bothered to look up info on e.g. which lane is safest to drive in, or how accident rates scale with sleep deprivation, or which freeways near my home present the largest risk. I'm motivated to do activities I associate with driving safety, but not to systematically estimate and reduce the risks. If a book was published on how to actually reduce my risk, I might read it, but more because it fits my identity as an aspiring rationalist and an aspiring goal-oriented person than than to, you know, actually reduce my risk of death. Which is the point.
wrt sleep deprivation, according to a DOT driver's manual, driving without having slept in 18 hours is equivalent in risk to driving with a .08 blood alcohol level. Driving without having slept in 24 hours corresponds to a .10 blood alcohol level.