what psychology teaches us. Turns out most of us just aren’t that good at calculating risk, especially when it comes to huge natural events like earthquakes. That also means we’re not very good at mitigating those kinds of risks. Why? And is it possible to get around our short-sightedness, so that this time, we’re actually prepared?
Risk perception is a vast, complex field of research. Here are just some of the core findings.
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in title, tags, annotations or urlSound waves could take a tsunami down a few notches - 0 views
The Psychology of Risk Perception Explains Why People Don't Fret the Pacific Northwest's Next Big Earthquake - CityLab - 0 views
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Studies show that when people calculate risk, especially when the stakes are high, we rely much more on feeling than fact. And we have trouble connecting emotionally to something scary if the odds of it happening today or tomorrow aren’t particularly high. So, if an earthquake, flood, tornado or hurricane isn’t immediately imminent, people are unlikely to act. “Perceiving risk is all about how scary or not do the facts feel,”
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This feeling also relates to how we perceive natural, as opposed to human-made, threats. We tend to be more tolerant of nature than of other people who would knowingly impose risks upon us—terrorists being the clearest example. “We think that nature is out of our control—it’s not malicious, it’s not profiting from us, we just have to bear with it,”
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The Age of Protest - The New York Times - 0 views
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If you go to The Guardian’s website these days you can find a section that is just labeled “Protest.” So now, with your morning coffee, you can get your news, weather, sports — and protests.
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In my view, this age of protest is driven, in part, by the fact that the three largest forces on the planet — globalization, Moore’s law and Mother Nature — are all in acceleration, creating an engine of disruption that is stressing strong countries and middle classes and blowing up weak ones, while superempowering individuals and transforming the nature of work, leadership and government all at once.
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When you get that much agitation in a world where everyone with a smartphone is now a reporter, news photographer and documentary filmmaker, it’s a wonder that every newspaper doesn’t have a “Protest” section.
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Facebook's Bias Is Built-In, and Bears Watching - The New York Times - 2 views
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Facebook is the world’s most influential source of news.That’s true according to every available measure of size — the billion-plus people who devour its News Feed every day, the cargo ships of profit it keeps raking in, and the tsunami of online traffic it sends to other news sites.
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But Facebook has also acquired a more subtle power to shape the wider news business. Across the industry, reporters, editors and media executives now look to Facebook the same way nesting baby chicks look to their engorged mother — as the source of all knowledge and nourishment, the model for how to behave in this scary new-media world. Case in point: The New York Times, among others, recently began an initiative to broadcast live video. Why do you suppose that might be? Yup, the F word. The deal includes payments from Facebook to news outlets, including The Times.
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Yet few Americans think of Facebook as a powerful media organization, one that can alter events in the real world. When blowhards rant about the mainstream media, they do not usually mean Facebook, the mainstreamiest of all social networks. That’s because Facebook operates under a veneer of empiricism. Many people believe that what you see on Facebook represents some kind of data-mined objective truth unmolested by the subjective attitudes of fair-and-balanced human beings.
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Damaged roads, lack of gear hinder Indonesia quake rescue - ABC News - 0 views
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Damaged roads and bridges, power blackouts and lack of heavy equipment on Saturday hampered rescuers after a strong earthquake left at least 49 people dead and hundreds injured on Indonesia's Sulawesi island.
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ollowing the magnitude 6.2 quake that struck early Friday,
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Mamuju late Saturday, raising the death toll to 49. A total of 40 people were killed in Mamuju, while nine bodies were retrieved in neighboring Majene district.
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How our brains numb us to covid-19's risks - and what we can do about it - The Washington Post - 1 views
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Social scientists have long known that we perceive risks that are acute, such as an impending tsunami, differently than chronic, ever-present threats like car accidents
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Part of what’s happening is that covid-19 — which we initially saw as a terrifying acute threat — is morphing into more of a chronic one in our minds. That shift likely dulls our perception of the danger,
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Now, when they think about covid-19, “most people have a reduced emotional reaction. They see it as less salient.”
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What Does It Mean to Have OCD? These Are 5 Common Symptoms | TIME - 0 views
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In recent years, OCD has become the psychological equivalent of hypoglycemia or gluten sensitivity: a condition untold numbers of people casually—almost flippantly—claim they’ve got, but in most cases don’t.
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In recent years, OCD has become the psychological equivalent of hypoglycemia or gluten sensitivity: a condition untold numbers of people casually—almost flippantly—claim they’ve got, but in most cases don’t.
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Same with the pain of OCD, which can interfere with work, relationships and more.
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Opinion | 24 Hours Without My Phone - The New York Times - 0 views
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Eventually, Shlain, a filmmaker, extended the idea into a full day without screen use. She called it a tech shabbat — after the Jewish day of rest — and she has written several articles and a recent book, called “24/6,” about the idea.
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“The digital revolution has blurred the lines between time on and time off, and time off is disappearing,” she wrote in The Boston Globe. “As for our leisure time, we’ve created a culture in which we’re still ‘working’ while we play: needing to photograph every moment, then crafting witty posts of our ‘fun, relaxing activities’ on Instagram, then obsessively checking responses. We can barely catch our breath in the tsunami of personal and work digital input, which results in us not being truly present for any of it.”
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The break did require some adjustments. On Friday night, we printed out directions to a restaurant where we were eating on Saturday, but we forgot to print directions home and had to use an old-fashioned road map. Imagine that.
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