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Comment by LanceH | Hacker News Reader

Moral panics. We still haven't found all those satanists. We haven't found the clowns. The Prius started working again once Toyota paid $1 billion and bolted the mat to the floor. Popcorn lung has apparently subsided. And the murder hornets were just visiting.

Still going strong is anything can be "grooming". And your child can be taken from you if you look away from them even once.

I really like the last one -- images of professional gangs having difficulty snatching that child because the mom is going to stop a professional gang.

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Believing the opposite extreme, that there is zero harm associated with moral panics, is necessarily true based on heuristics is arguably not optimal thinking either.

Thinking better than dummies is not hard, but thinking without error is a lot harder than it seems. I think if more people started thinking in terms of both relative and absolute comparisons the world might improve. If you only think in relative terms, you are living in a dream world of sorts.

The problem with the moral panics is that people jump onto the bandwagon with zero evidence. Some are just paranoid and distrustful, others want to feed the panic.

I'm not asking that everyone think better, just that they think. Especially in a day where everyone has a camera and there are child snatching clowns all over the place -- just a little bit of skepticism goes a long way.

Questioning a wild claim out of nowhere isn't the same as thinking something isn't dangerous. It's thinking a claim has no basis.

Take the cinnamon challenge. Literally millions of people doing this. Then the claim comes up it is killing people. Yet these claims don't have any names or actual news articles that aren't in a circular reference. It may or may not injure you, but with millions or 10's of millions doing it, if people are dying there would be evidence of that.

All those Prius's with sudden acceleration -- and when everyone calmed down, the fix was floor mats and not cosmic rays. The real answer is that it was bad driving because all the brakes still worked perfectly well and if you press both the car stops. It was bizarre watching this play out after watching the same stupidity from the Audi 5000 in the 80's.

> The problem with the moral panics is that people jump onto the bandwagon with zero evidence. Some are just paranoid and distrustful, others want to feed the panic.

Another problem: people thinking this is what's happening, when it is actually not.

> I'm not asking that everyone think better, just that they think. Especially in a day where everyone has a camera and there are child snatching clowns all over the place -- just a little bit of skepticism goes a long way.

Using specific, maximally absurd examples to prove one's broad beliefs may not be optimal thinking.

> Questioning a wild claim out of nowhere isn't the same as thinking something isn't dangerous. It's thinking a claim has no basis.

Where "thinking" = heuristics.

> Take the cinnamon challenge...

There is not shortage of instances of people thinking genuinely poorly, but there is also no shortage of instances of people using such instances to predict broader instances, and predictions about reality tend to be considered to be reality itself (as a consequence of evolution, culture, etc).

It'd be easier to take moral panics even a little bit seriously if one actually turned out to be true.

Has there ever been a moral panic that turned out to be true? The closest I can think of is maybe the teetotaler/prohibition movement. Alcohol truly does cause a great deal of harm to society.

Not having been alive in the late 1800s and early 1900s I can't speak to if it was really viewed as a moral panic similar to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s that I got to experience.

People don't call them moral panics if they turn out to be true...it's almost by definition. E.g. say the catholic priests turned out to not have been molesting children, it would have been called a moral panic, but it's true, so it wasn't a moral panic.

I do not think that the sexual assault by Catholic Priests ever was a moral panic in the spirit of the other ones I mentioned. It was long-term persistent and it never played a role in elections.

It was a long simmering issue that was very hard to elevate such that action was taken. I would argue it was very much akin to the multi-decade struggle for LGB rights. Long slog with slow progress, but eventually reaching success.

Well whatever example, opium or crack epidemic, hiv, etc, point being it's always retrospectively that moral panics are defined, after it turned out that people were concerned over nothing.

As in, if you had found out the satanists were real, well it wouldn't have been a moral panic anymore.

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