Quotes or book excerpts that I find particularly insightful
|"According to the latest data, people are living longer and becoming healthier, better fed, richer, smarter, safer, more connected–and, at the same time, ever gloomier about the state of the world... This disconnect originates in the nature of news.
News is about what happens, not what doesn't happen, so it features sudden and upsetting events like fires, plant closings, rampage shootings and shark attacks. Most positive developments are not camera-friendly, and they aren't built in a day. You never see a headline about a country that is not at war, or a city that has not been attacked by terrorists–or the fact that since yesterday, 180,000 people have escaped extreme poverty.
The bad habits of media in turn bring out the worst in human cognition. Our intuitions about risk are driven not by statistics but by images and stories... It's easy to see how this cognitive bias–stoked by the news policy "If it bleeds, it leads"–could make people conclude the worst about where the world is heading.
Irrational pessimism is also driven by a morbid interest in what can go wrong–and there are always more ways for things to go wrong than to go right. This creates a market for experts to remind us of things that can go wrong that we may have overlooked. Biblical prophets, oped pundits, social critics, dystopian filmmakers and tabloid psychics know they can achieve instant gravitas by warning of an imminent doomsday. Those who point out that the world is getting better–even hardheaded analysts who are just reading out the data–may be dismissed as starry-eyed naifs."
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