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The Corona Virus Will Kill You!
How we’re always fooled in the same way by the same sensationalism
Although most of us imagine we’re capable of reason and that we understand the world around us, for the most part it’s not actually true. There’s now a wealth of scientific evidence that shows we’re very easily fooled in a wide variety of ways.
As we’d expect, many people over the millennia have realized there’s a good living to be made from exploiting our inbuilt cognitive weaknesses and we are reliably exploited every single day of our lives.
Fortune tellers, astrologers, psychics, priests, shamans, gurus, witch-doctors and so many others are a constant feature of human society, ready to mug us psychologically in order to extract a handful of dollars or some other important resource for practically no effort at all. Politicians know how easy it is to gull vast numbers of citizens in order to secure votes and gain the temporary illusion and trappings of power.
The mass media likewise knows how to exploit our tiny ape-brains for profit, which is why in so many countries the “news” is nothing more than fear-mongering sensationalism.
This week’s sensation is of course the corona virus. The media knows we can be terrified by tales of infection rates and death, so that’s what it feeds us. And we take the bait because we’re…
