At Barkley Meadows Park in Del Valle on January 29th we walked completely around Berdoll Pond, at whose far end I did many takes on drowned tree remains. The nearby skeleton of the plant shown below (perhaps poverty weed) also attracted me.
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The press is an availability machine. It serves up anecdotes which feed our impression of what's common in a way that is guaranteed to mislead. Since news is what happens, not what doesn't happen, the denominator in the fraction corresponding to the true probability of an event—all the opportunities for the event to occur, including those in which it doesn't—is invisible, leaving us in the dark about how prevalent something is.
The distortions, moreover, are not haphazard, but misdirect us toward the morbid. Things that happened suddenly are usually bad—a war, a shooting, famine, financial collapse—but good things may consist of nothing happening, like a boring country at peace or a forgettable region that is healthy and well fed. And when progress takes place, it isn't built in a day; it creeps up a few percentage points a year, transforming the world by stealth.
— Steven Pinker, Rationality, 2021
© 2022 Steven Schwartzman
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