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Opinion
Get Paranoid! Written by William Urbanski
This somewhat exaggerated and ridiculous scenario illustrates the usefulness of “constructive paranoia.” This seemingly self-contradicting term was coined by Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who could be aptly described as an OG (“original gangster”) of anthropology. Constructive paranoia means the avoidance of any activity for which the risk of a catastrophic outcome (i.e., getting smacked by a dilapidated ice cream truck moving so quickly that there are flames coming out from the tires) is low but where
we participate in the activity all the time. Constructive paranoia often results in people avoiding doing things that seem pretty much harmless to an outsider but which are well understood by those in the know to regularly cause devastation. In his amazing book The World Until Yesterday, Diamond explains, in detail, an example of constructive paranoia that he later realized most likely saved his life many times over. Diamond regularly spent days on end in the forests of Papua New Guinea in order to observe some of the native bird species that are endemic to the region. One time, he decided he would like to set up his camping platform under a massive tree, but his native guides adamantly refused because the tree was dead. Diamond became agitated because even though the tree was dead, it was huge, looked solid, and there was basically no chance that it would fall over and crush him in the night. Long story short, the guides wanted nothing to do with Diamond’s camp-under-a-dead-tree plan, and he was forced to sleep elsewhere.
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
August 2020
OPINION
I
magine yourself standing at the side of a country road. Naturally, there are trucks and cars that use it, but they do so infrequently and irregularly. What would happen if you put on a blindfold, threw in some earplugs, and then crossed the road? Probably nothing, right? Now, what if you repeated this exercise three times a week for ten years? What would happen, as a virtual statistic probability, is that sooner or later you would get smacked back to the stone age by a dilapidated ice cream truck.
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