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.