{"id":33988,"date":"2018-05-04T13:51:26","date_gmt":"2018-05-04T18:51:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33988"},"modified":"2018-05-04T13:51:26","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T18:51:26","slug":"the-root-of-it-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33988","title":{"rendered":"The Root of It All"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"article-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title single-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/theirrelevantinvestor.com\/2018\/05\/03\/the-root-of-it-all\/\">The Root of It All<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<section class=\"entry-content clearfix\">Steven Pinker wrote, \u201cIn almost every year from 1992 through 2015, an era in which the rate of violent crime plummeted, a majority of Americans told pollsters that crime was rising. In late 2015, large majorities in eleven developed countries said that \u201cthe world is getting worse.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But crime isn\u2019t rising, and the world is objectively <a href=\"http:\/\/awealthofcommonsense.com\/2018\/04\/50-ways-the-world-is-getting-better\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">getting better<\/a>. And while life is improving at the macro level, at the micro level, people aren\u2019t feeling so great. So what gives?<\/p>\n<p>We tend to expect the worst as a way to insulate ourselves from disappointment. Life is not about good or bad, it\u2019s about better or worse, so if things don\u2019t turn out as bad as we imagine, we\u2019re pleasantly surprised.<\/p>\n<p>If you were asked to think about how your life could improve, a few things might come to mind. But imagine how your life could get worse, and a barrage of negative possibilities fills your brain. The risk and reward of every day life is asymmetrical. This is why being a pessimist feels safe and being an optimist feels reckless.<\/p>\n<p>One of the reasons why it seems like the world is getting worse is due to the cacophony of noise coming from the news. Here\u2019s Pinker again:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Whether or not the world is really getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is. News is about things that happen, nothing things that don\u2019t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, \u201cI\u2019m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out\u201d- or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up\u2026Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren\u2019t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Root of It All Steven Pinker wrote, \u201cIn almost every year from 1992 through 2015, an era in which the rate of violent crime plummeted, a majority of Americans told pollsters that crime was rising. In late 2015, large majorities in eleven developed countries said that \u201cthe world is getting worse.\u201d But crime isn\u2019t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[20042,20040,642,20041,20039,862,20043],"class_list":["post-33988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-better","tag-michael-batnick","tag-poverty","tag-steven-pinker","tag-the-irrelevant-investor","tag-war","tag-worse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33988"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33989,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33988\/revisions\/33989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}