Why is it accepted that feelings should be relevant here? I'm not trying to be provocative, I'm genuinely open to listen to your response to that.

To paraphrase Data O'Briain, "zombies are at an all-time low but the fear of zombies could be incredibly high, doesn't mean we should have government policies to deal with the fear of zombies": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zopCDSK69gs

If we're getting meta, I think that the first thing that should be discussed is: What are we optimizing for, and how do we measure it?