EgonSpengler
Deity
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2014
- Messages
- 12,158
Anyway, as has already been said nostalgia is fraught with cognitive bias—“golden age” kind of implies things have declined since then, but I’d rather have today’s technology and earning power than the fifties or sixties.
I was watching an old film about railroad crossing safety and not having your car get stuck on the tracks. Is that something we think about as a really credible risk today? All those little things we take for granted.
Right, people's ideas about whether or not things are going well, or what the genuine problems or risks are, are so often wrong it boggles the mind (well, my mind, anyway). If you're right that train accidents are something most people don't think about anymore (and I have to admit that I don't think about it much), the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration says there are about 2 "incidents" at railroad crossings a day. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada says there were 167 accidents at crossings in 2018.This still happens all the time today lol. Just recently a cop left a woman handcuffed in a car and left it on the tracks to be hit by a train.
In the same way that some people may look back on a bygone era with rose-colored glasses, there are also people who think present conditions are worse than they actually are.