as a pathologist I can find a lot of observations that could have caused problems in a person’s or an animal’s life time yet did not. This makes me think of the danger of doing complete body scans as a kind of health check. You might observe something that will never manifest itself as a problem in the future. But you would not know.
I think our cognitive biases to fear and negativity, and to narrative/story, are most of the explanation. But the last part is the most interesting to me. We humans are such funny animals, both hyper aware of the indefiniteness of our experience of this life and the uncertainties of the future (because of that same fear bias?) and unable to really accept it. We invent methods and systems that help us cope with our predicament, help us make good/better choices despite the uncertainty - e.g., reading and writing, the scientific method, legal systems, democracy. But then we want to turn those choices into certainties. It seems to just be our nature and a cognitive process that is very hard to resist. Right now I am resisting the urge to say that we could finally overcome it once and for all if only we could devise a good method to help people avoid falling into it....
as a pathologist I can find a lot of observations that could have caused problems in a person’s or an animal’s life time yet did not. This makes me think of the danger of doing complete body scans as a kind of health check. You might observe something that will never manifest itself as a problem in the future. But you would not know.
I think our cognitive biases to fear and negativity, and to narrative/story, are most of the explanation. But the last part is the most interesting to me. We humans are such funny animals, both hyper aware of the indefiniteness of our experience of this life and the uncertainties of the future (because of that same fear bias?) and unable to really accept it. We invent methods and systems that help us cope with our predicament, help us make good/better choices despite the uncertainty - e.g., reading and writing, the scientific method, legal systems, democracy. But then we want to turn those choices into certainties. It seems to just be our nature and a cognitive process that is very hard to resist. Right now I am resisting the urge to say that we could finally overcome it once and for all if only we could devise a good method to help people avoid falling into it....