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Why are we inclined to believe the catastrophic scenario even though we have long known most of these predictions come to be false? Why are we inclined to trust the institutions that keep publicizing these predictions and never apologize for being wrong or reflect on what led them to be wrong?
Why do catastrophic predictions often feel right? So much so that even if catastrophic predictions of climate change or resource depletion, or pollution have been false in the past, many of us feel they have to eventually come true sooner or later.
It is time to understand that the news media will always trade on bad news due to human inclinations. When faced with various solutions to a problem, the simplest will most often be correct. So much in life is terribly exaggerated. It brings to my mind a rule I live by called Occam’s Razor. A 14th-century philosopher coined the following rule.
An example is, “if walking in a pasture and hearing hoofbeats behind you, assume they are horses and not zebras. The term razor is used to indicate literally shaving off more complicated assumptions. Catastrophic scenarios are virtually never the simplest predictions and almost never the correct ones.
