WW2 is an excellent example of a situation where large amounts of people must be made aware of a single threat. Fear and panic makes the threat move up your priority list. In emergency mode, you can still vividly remember what caused the panic.
It works well for one threat, but it doesn’t help when you have multiple distant threats. How do you manage mobilization against climate change and X-risk, through fear, at the same time?
Should we make separate groups of people care about separate concerns, each fearing a single distant threat? That would be effective, with each person having their one priority they are very concerned about (a caveat, they would probably see the other groups as blissful ignorants).
I have several (cached) assumptions behind this. I need to do some extra research on the matter to be confident about this.
First, the brain is very bad at estimating actual danger based on fear. If you picture death from a 1-in-a-million-years event, it will be the same reaction for a 1-in-a-century event. When you calm down, you may be able to sort out which event is more threatening, but you will have a better time figuring out calmly which problem is the most significant and then trigger a fear reaction about it.
Second, fear about threat A can warp perception about threat B even if the two aren’t related, because immediate action is needed towards solving A and whatever threat B is cannot be as important at the moment. I exaggerate a bit; I have a hard time how anyone could manage having to take potentially conflicting actions against several threats at once.
Multiple threats matter because you need to split your resources between them: does fear help in that case, given that fear pushes you, not only to take action, but immediate and probably miscalibrated action to squash the threat?
It doesn’t work like that for me. I find that I am actually kind of flexible in where exactly I direct the urge to do something, whether it’s out of fear of guilt or something else. But that could be because I sort of put everything I do on a linear scale of usefulness and have no problem to do rough maths with just about everything.
Out of curiosity, you say you need to do research, what are sources which you think are credible about this topic? I am fairly skeptic about the existence of such sources.
Does being scared take willpower? … Or maybe to act on being scared takes willpower …? … With too many threats I visualize the same aphasia/ not caring that you get from having spent too much willpower on things.
WW2 is an excellent example of a situation where large amounts of people must be made aware of a single threat. Fear and panic makes the threat move up your priority list. In emergency mode, you can still vividly remember what caused the panic.
It works well for one threat, but it doesn’t help when you have multiple distant threats. How do you manage mobilization against climate change and X-risk, through fear, at the same time?
Should we make separate groups of people care about separate concerns, each fearing a single distant threat? That would be effective, with each person having their one priority they are very concerned about (a caveat, they would probably see the other groups as blissful ignorants).
I don’t understand why you think this is true. Fear pushes you to take action. Why should whether it is a single threat or multiple threats matter?
I have several (cached) assumptions behind this. I need to do some extra research on the matter to be confident about this.
First, the brain is very bad at estimating actual danger based on fear. If you picture death from a 1-in-a-million-years event, it will be the same reaction for a 1-in-a-century event. When you calm down, you may be able to sort out which event is more threatening, but you will have a better time figuring out calmly which problem is the most significant and then trigger a fear reaction about it.
Second, fear about threat A can warp perception about threat B even if the two aren’t related, because immediate action is needed towards solving A and whatever threat B is cannot be as important at the moment. I exaggerate a bit; I have a hard time how anyone could manage having to take potentially conflicting actions against several threats at once.
Multiple threats matter because you need to split your resources between them: does fear help in that case, given that fear pushes you, not only to take action, but immediate and probably miscalibrated action to squash the threat?
I can only speculate at this point.
It doesn’t work like that for me. I find that I am actually kind of flexible in where exactly I direct the urge to do something, whether it’s out of fear of guilt or something else. But that could be because I sort of put everything I do on a linear scale of usefulness and have no problem to do rough maths with just about everything.
Out of curiosity, you say you need to do research, what are sources which you think are credible about this topic? I am fairly skeptic about the existence of such sources.
(Not sure, just a guess)
Does being scared take willpower? … Or maybe to act on being scared takes willpower …? … With too many threats I visualize the same aphasia/ not caring that you get from having spent too much willpower on things.