Today I thought of writing less about my own life and more about certain things that are rather interesting to note. I've read a few of Cory Doctorow's books lately - he shares many of them for free on the internet, which is pretty awesome in my opinion. I encourage everyone to go check them out. The books are great and, especially to older people, they should prove to be a valuable viewpoint into the modern culture and the effect of the Internet on our society.
Another text, this one an article from a popular Finnish science magazine, talked about how risks are perceived as opposed to how they're calculated. Things we feel aren't in our control are seen as very scary, while if we feel as though we can affect things it doesn't even matter that we're actually at a greater risk. That's why flying on airplanes is feared more than driving with a car even though the latter results in way more deaths per travelled kilometer.
One great example is nuclear power. An accident at a nuclear reactor would result in maybe thirty thousand deaths, tops. If we built enough nuclear reactors to power the entire world, we'd have maybe one accident every two hundred years or so. That's what, 150 a year. Whereas CO2, carbon dioxide, is just what we breathe out. It's not scary at all, right? But if we don't stop spewing too much of it into the atmosphere, six sevenths of humankind will die. That's six billion. Feeling any fear yet?
Evolution has equipped us to be much more attentive towards things that could kill us than things that don't really matter, for obvious reasons. However, that means nowadays, when we live in a world with little to no real risks, we pay attention to all kinds of media fearmongering instead of scientific fact. According to a couple of studies, human beings would need seven occurrences of someone telling them Thing A is good to believe it after someone said once that Thing A is bad.
GM-food, nuclear power, viral medicines and such could have saved millions of lives so far, if they had not been blocked by the public opinion brought by the overstatement of minor risks in the news. Great going, naive world-saving greenfreaks.
Well, if anyone knows how the mob mentality works, it's politicians. Rational and well thought-out ideas for the intelligentsia are all good and well but the majority of the voters will vote for those who promise them the best benefits, despite the tax cuts being unattainable, or that guy whose face they saw on the news, not even realizing that they're voting for a party, not an individual. Why exactly do they assume that if someone's a good pop singer or a great hockey player he'd make a good president is beyond me. Oh well.
That's one of the underlying traps of democracy. If everyone voted for what's best for them, the majority would be the best off. However, since everyone votes for people who then decide what's best for everyone, it tends to lead to poor decisions as well. It's much easier to get a mob of people to vote for you than to actually make good initiatives and build the society in the right direction.
Benevolent dictatorship is the best /theoretical/ form of government. So yeah, Murska for King, folks.
EDIT: I would like to note that, if I end up having a political career in the future and my opponents dig this blog post up to use it against me in the media, I do not in fact endorse dictatorship over democracy. A benevolent dictatorship is a theoretical form of government unattainable in practice.
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