The other option is to be more realistic - people often have wildly unrealistic expectations of how the world should work and seem to get a bit stressed when they are confronted with reality.
The more pressing problem is the voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent. If policies were made after a bit of experimentation, maybe trying a few things in parallel [0] and with prescribed objectives they were to be evaluated against the legislative process would get better results.
[0] The results of experiments like Shenzhen are significant. The US used to be a lot better at letting people act independently too.
> voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent
I think this is almost the correct diagnosis, but the real problem is adjacent to that: it’s very easy for opponents to capitalize on political decisions that accept risk. It’s not that people love “do something, anything” policy making—rather, it’s that when the appropriate policy action is either to do nothing or to do something that accepts the probability that bad things may still happen, people are extremely sympathetic to opposing claims like “oh, so you mean you want people to die in <thing> events in the future”.
Policymaking is such asymmetric information warfare that many times the ideal policy solution isn’t even mentioned because it’s understood to be suicidally unmarketable. Leverage and empathy favor the reactionary advocates who drag (for example) the people bereaved by drowning deaths into the spotlight over the people saying “maybe we shouldn’t ban all swimming”.
...except for guns. That topic is off-limits at all levels of government. The problem is never guns, it is mental health, or drugs, or poverty, and the only solution is more police and more people in prisons.
> and the only solution is more police and more people in prisons.
The solution is more guns, or so I'm told. If only more people were "packing heat" then surely criminals wouldn't dare to commit crimes.
Just disregard the circular firing squads that too often occur when these would-be heroes start overreacting to everything, including each other.
..and democracy. The problem is never democracy itself, it's the autocrats, or extremists, or social media, and solution is more regulations on private life and more mentions of the paradox of intolerance.
Clearly the whole gun thing is working, though. Regular citizens can all feel safe in public areas and schools, while the potential of a fascist government greed-fueled rise is kept well-at-bay by the fact that the general populace has the right to bear arms.
Nice sarcasm
Agreed. Even more generally: the argument "I voted and it didn't change anything" has always seemed to me incredibly self-absorbed. Of course your individual vote didn't change anything. After all, it was worth no more than a hundred million other votes, and some of those voters (deep breath!) did not share your personal values and priorities.
That's facile. Such statements are clearly a synecdoche for the phenomena of well-organized grassroots campaigns getting steamrolled by massively-funded advertising from PACs, or popular votes/referenda being overridden or stymied by small numbers of electeds. Anyone who is politically active has seen numerous examples of this: here's a recent one from Utah: https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2026/05/04/box-elder-commission...
There is a lot of corruption in political systems and false equivalences such as the above do not help.
What is the corruption you are alleging here? I live in Salt Lake City and I haven't heard any arguments against that data center that don't boil down to some kind of conspiracy theory or just a fundamental lack of understanding of scale and engineering. Are you claiming that the commissioners were bribed?
Why build data centers in water scarce, often hot deserts?
Perhaps folks are also upset the DCs will host AI that may affect their job prospects or at least compensation?
Isn't the salt lake an environmental disaster waiting to happen, especially as it is drained for more development?
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All no doubt true and none of it contradicts my point.
> After all, it was worth no more than a hundred million other votes
Not strictly true for presidential elections.
My vote cast in CT literally matters more than someone else's vote cast in CA. Yay electoral college!
But that’s because CA matters more than CT. Thank God for the electoral college!
It’s more a question of knowing when to unplug yourself on things that are affecting you but that you cannot control. From government news to something bad happening miles from you. These news can affect you but you have no control over the situation. Not doing so is actually one way to get depression.
Not sure you can “unplug” from things that affect you that you cannot control? Sooner or later you’ll have to deal with that issue. I do think you can “unplug” from things that do not affect you that you cannot control.
For instance, if you’re an immigrant, and ICE is rounding up immigrants in your neighborhood, you can go ahead and mentally “unplug” as you like. But you’re going to have to deal with the reality of your situation when you get to the immigration detainment facility. And if you’re actively dealing with that reality, are you really “unplugged”?
At the same time, whether or not Trump turns the white house into a cage match spectacle for his birthday, I mean, it won’t really affect most people. So I would think that’s a lot easier to “unplug” from since it’s not affecting you.
You unplug yourself from media and social media. And maybe open the news paper of your town if you want to spice up your life. The rest you will probably hear all about it anyway from families or colleagues if it’s something big. We are in the era of over connections. We need to know how to unplug. It doesn’t have to be as extreme as u said but if someone is as much as affected like this, this person definitely needs a huge break.
For ICE it’s kinda a big stretch can we agree? And in this case the person does have control. This person does have agency over the issue and should regularize their situation as soon as possible.
A city bus ran over a 17yo girl during a right turn, in ljubljana, slovenia, and killed her a month ago.
It's been multiple decades of dozens of city bus routes being driven by bus drivers in buses, accounting for millions of left and right turns, in sunshine, in the dark, during snowstorms and hot sunny weather, and we had was one dead girl in a freak accident.
Reading the online comments the day that happened (and a few days after) was exactly as you said... the buses are the problem, the crossroad is the problem, the traffic lights are the problem, too many people on the bus are a problem, not enough sensors is a problem, the mayor is a problem, the driver certification is the problem... everything is a problem, everything needs to be changed, "the government has to do something", and worse. And the media pumped it all up and made it worse of course.
I think the biggest thing that people refuse to accept is that the optimal number of accidental deaths is non zero
And this carries on for all the other sources of injury and other "bad" things. Provided, of course, the cause it's explicit and direct.
And that the cause can be addressed by regulation. There's no regulation that will protect from bad actors so designing the system to cater to them in extremely specific ways just creates more red tape for normal people.
Said another way, mandating safer intersections will apply to all motorists and pedestrians equally when they interact with each other at a crossing, but if the bus driver forgets to take their crazy pills that morning and the voices in their head say to run someone over, there's no amount of safety systems or auto-stop that are likely to really prevent harm from being done.
In most Western European nations however, we are fully capable of designing and enforcing travel networks that should rarely produce fatalities when it comes to interactions between cars and pedestrians. The reason many countries don't is a matter of political will.
So well put!
Another problem is misunderstanding incentives. People think that, if fish protection should be a goal of society, any fish protection law is a good one. Not many can think through second order effects, the drag of regulations on pro-safety innovation, the impact of foreign jurisdictions that don't have this law (or only pretend to follow it for their own gain).
And before the question of trade offs there is the question "does the Fish Protection Act actually protect fish at all?" In a very large number of cases it does not.
I've felt for a long time that laws should have an attached "intent" section and one function of the courts should be to invalidate laws which, after a period of being in place and some analysis, fail to achieve their stated intent.
I think it would be good for democracy if lawmakers had to put in writing what the law is supposed to accomplish AND if that were something legally binding.
An alarming number of people seem to build their intuition about the world from fictional sources, without even realizing it. Movies, tv, books if you're lucky, and now social media all warp the least experienced people's sense of reality. If you watch the old clip shows of home videos, one recurring theme is that people got their intuition about physics from tv or movies. They'd make ramps for their bikes that were laughable and then take a header. They'd jump off roofs onto yoga balls and break their backs.
I think we're seeing a much greater extension of that as people increasingly engage with the world through the lens of media and stories we tell, rather than... you know... doing things.
I’m not normally one for doom and gloom, everything is getting worse kind of thinking. However, one observation from the past few years in particular is exactly that thing, a specific kind of faulty media literacy.
Someone will read Lord of the Flies, for example, and come to the conclusion that it says something real about human nature. No dude, it’s just a story. Someone made it up. It’s not real. It can be interesting and insightful, even a useful mental framework or thought experiment, but it’s not proof or evidence at all! But I increasingly see people treat fiction as if it’s real things that actually happened, and that worries me.
>An alarming number of people seem to build their intuition about the world from fictional sources, without even realizing it.
A friend of mine had a machete that they destroyed when they took a mighty swing at a tiny tree. You could put your hand around this tree but still, do you expect to chop through a baseball bat with your sword like Conan the Barbarian? Too many films depict unrealistic swordplay.
> You could put your hand around this tree
To be fair, that's entirely reasonable to cut down with a machete. There's a bit of a technique to it and it'll take more than one swing but if you don't have a chainsaw handy a good machete will do the job.
>it'll take more than one swing
That’s the crux of this story. There is an expectation that, if you can chop something down in several swings, then one really big swing will do it, right? No. They don’t make machetes and swords like that, and also you are drastically underestimating the force required, or overestimating your strength, or both.
And don't forget that those fictional sources are typically commissioned by oligarchs with their own vested interest in herding the voting masses
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