To be worried about a possibility does not require that the possibility is an actuality.
I am more annoyed by the sheer confidence people have. If they were saying “this is a possibility, let’s investigate” that seems fine.
Re: the rest of your comment, I feel like you are casting it into a decision framework while ignoring the possible decision “get more information about whether there is a problem or not”, which seems like the obvious choice given lack of confidence.
If at some point you become convinced that it is impossible / too expensive to get more information (I’d be really suspicious, but it could be true) then I’d agree you should bias towards worry.
I would guess that the fact that people regularly fail to inhabit the mindset of “I don’t know that this is a problem, let’s try to figure out whether it is actually a problem” is a source of tons of problems in society (e.g. anti-vaxxers, worries that WiFi radiation kills you, anti-GMO concerns, worries about blood clots for COVID vaccines, …). Admittedly in these cases the people are making a mistake of being confident, but even if you fixed the overconfidence they would continue to behave similarly if they used the reasoning in your comment. Certainly I don’t personally know why you should be super confident that GMOs aren’t harmful, and I’m unclear on whether humanity as a whole has the knowledge to be super confident in that.
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I am more annoyed by the sheer confidence people have. If they were saying “this is a possibility, let’s investigate” that seems fine.
Re: the rest of your comment, I feel like you are casting it into a decision framework while ignoring the possible decision “get more information about whether there is a problem or not”, which seems like the obvious choice given lack of confidence.
If at some point you become convinced that it is impossible / too expensive to get more information (I’d be really suspicious, but it could be true) then I’d agree you should bias towards worry.
I would guess that the fact that people regularly fail to inhabit the mindset of “I don’t know that this is a problem, let’s try to figure out whether it is actually a problem” is a source of tons of problems in society (e.g. anti-vaxxers, worries that WiFi radiation kills you, anti-GMO concerns, worries about blood clots for COVID vaccines, …). Admittedly in these cases the people are making a mistake of being confident, but even if you fixed the overconfidence they would continue to behave similarly if they used the reasoning in your comment. Certainly I don’t personally know why you should be super confident that GMOs aren’t harmful, and I’m unclear on whether humanity as a whole has the knowledge to be super confident in that.