We misperceive risk, assuming that some things are much more dangerous than they really are and others much less. We live in an exaggerated present—we pay too much attention to recent experience and too little attention to the past, focusing on current events rather than long-term behavior. We discount the future at rates that make no economic or ecological sense. We don’t give all incoming signals their appropriate weights. We don’t let in at all news we don’t like, or information that doesn’t fit our mental models. Which is to say, we don’t even make decisions that optimize our own
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