Chris Nolan's Joker is a very clever guy, almost Monroesque in his ability to identify hypocrisy and inconsistency. One of his most interesting scenes in the film has him point out how people estimate horrible things differently depending on whether they're part of what's "normal", what's "expected", rather than on how inherently horrifying they are, or how many people are involved.
Soon people extrapolated this observation to other such apparent inconsistencies in human judgment, where a behaviour that once was acceptable, with a simple tweak or change in context, becomes the subject of a much more serious reaction.
I think there's rationalist merit in giving these inconsistencies a serious look. I intuit that there's some sort of underlying pattern to them, something that makes psychological sense, in the roundabout way that most irrational things do. I think that much good could come out of figuring out what that root cause is, and how to predict this effect and manage it.
Phenomena that come to mind, are, for instance, from an Effective Altruism point of view, the expenses incurred in counter-terrorism (including some wars that were very expensive in treasure and lives), and the number of lives said expenses save, compared with the number of lives that could be saved by spending that same amount into improving road safety, increasing public helathcare expense where it would do the most good, building better lightning rods (in the USA you're four times more likely to be struck by thunder than by terrorists), or legalizing drugs.
What do y'all think? Why do people have their priorities all jumbled-up? How can we predict these effects? How can we work around them?
I just don't see how this post is saying anything but: "Irrationality is bad. We should do something about that. Ideas?"
This post summarizes the entire enterprise in which we're engaged, and offers a few examples of manifestations of the problem, and some pop culture references. The answers to your questions are: people have their priorities jumbled for lots of reasons that have been discussed; they jumble their priorities in systematic ways but it's not always obvious which way they'll pull out of the hat, so it's only semi-predictable, and; people have tried to work around them by writing things like the Sequences and the academic material that covers the same ground, but it's hit or miss like most things because we don't always know Exactly What To Say and because knowing about jumbled priorities doesn't unjumble them. This problem has been around long enough to have been sort of broken up into subproblems, so if you want to help, you should probably offer new insight on an existing subproblem or come up with a whole new subproblem. I don't see how fallaciously generalizing from the Joker's half-baked commentary on society's tendency to insulate people from anxiety-provoking uncertainty is tangibly helpful in that regard. I don't see what this post contributes.
Indeed, I have very little to contribute on my own. I'm mostly here to learn.
I'm not generalizing from the Joker's reflection. Rather, I'm using it as a springboard to talk about an issue that concerns me; namely, what triggers fear and warth and outrage in people and what doesn't. I think this is a different kind of bias from just scope insensitivity or fundamental attribution error or overconfidence bias or anything like that. Those can be overcome by just explaining the facts. This one, however, can't; explaining stuff and putting numbers forth will only get you accused of sophistry. I find that very frustrating.