No survival instincts

Imagine you go to the doctor. The doctor prescribes you medicine. You go to the pharmacist, who dispenses it to you. You then take it as directed.

The chances of something bad happening to you as a result of this are basically 0. At least, if you google the medicine you won’t see that it’s neurotoxic and unhealthy to take. And if you look at the google reviews of your pharmacist, it probably won’t say “1 star, pharmacist gave me 10x the prescribed dose and I almost died”. The whole system basically has checks from top to bottom that make it very safe.

I’m not saying that they’re infallible or that you don’t need to be an advocate for your own health or whatever. I’m saying that if you follow the doctor’s orders, it probably won’t be the case that it goes horribly wrong because the pharmacist accidentally mixed rat poison into your pills. The fuck ups are way less obvious than that. It’ll be like, “the doctor didn’t think of this obscure condition and if they had they would have recommended a different course of action.” Or “the doctor wasn’t informed of the latest research on the condition.” Not “the doctor told you to get on chemotherapy because he thought you were annoying and wanted to make your hair fall out for a laugh.”

Point being, you can basically turn your brain off and do what your doctor says and it’ll probably be mostly fine.

This mindset works basically everywhere in life. Let’s say you’re thinking of renting an apartment. Obviously no one wants to rent an apartment that would be prone to catching on fire and killing everyone inside. But also, most people don’t really know how to check if an apartment would be prone to that. I mean, most people could think of some things to check if they put their mind to it. (Test the fire alarms? imagine how easy egress would be from a bedroom? look into how fire-proof the materials the apartment was built out of are?) But no one does any of that, and that’s fine, because there’s like fire codes and stuff that do a reasonable job. You basically don’t have to think about fire safety as a renter. It’s taken care of.

Same for music festivals. People don’t generally die at them. Or rollercoasters. It’s a major news story when someone dies on one. (One of my college professors used to work on rollercoasters, and he mentioned that some coasters get 7 million riders a year. So even if there’s a million-to-one chance of something happening, the designer of the coaster has to assume it’s basically guaranteed to happen multiple times a year.)

I leave my car’s engine on when I pump gas. Why? Isn’t that dangerous? I’ve never googled it, but I know it’s not. If it were dangerous, the car wouldn’t let me do it. The mere fact that I can do it is proof that it’s safe. (The main remaining ways to operate a car dangerously all have had enormous awareness campaigns to make sure that everyone knows about them.)¹

All of this culminates to a world where people have no survival instincts. And that’s a good thing. It’s nice that you can go through life without thinking of safety and be mostly fine. Cars will yell at you if you forget your seatbelt. Phones don’t explode. Planes don’t crash. You can log in to your bank from your laptop or phone and you won’t get hacked. And if the bank fails you’ll get your money back (if you’re a regular person). Your milk has been pasteurized properly and won’t make you sick. You plug hair dryers into your bathroom outlet and don’t have to worry about electrocution. It’s nice. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where any of that wasn’t true. You can buy toys for your kids and they won’t contain lead or be choking hazards.

Just be aware of this. There may be a point in your life when you want to leave the tutorial zone and do things whose safety cannot be assumed by the mere fact that they exist. You might want to buy drugs, or travel to a dangerous part of a developing country, or live in some hippie commune. In those circumstances, your only option is to personally understand the risks, and how to detect or mitigate them. It’s a totally new mindset to how we typically operate. We typically don’t know the risks involved in what we do, but it’s fine because we expect society to have mitigated them. When we leave the tutorial zone, we still don’t necessarily know the risks, but it’s not fine because it’s probably the case that no one has mitigated them. You have to do it yourself.

1. I used to be surprised that gas stoves don’t automatically shut off the gas if you don’t ignite it. It seems like it should be so easy, and the risk of filling up your apartment with natural gas seems pretty bad. So I googled it, and apparently stoves in europe are required to have what’s called a flame supervision device that automatically cuts the gas if the flame goes out. But I don’t think they’re required in the US. On the other hand, US gas has an additive, mercaptan, that gives it a sulfur smell. (Without that additive, it would be odorless.) So it’s not like we’ve taken no precautions at all. I honestly doubt that many people even die from leaving the gas open in their stove.