Assessing unprecedented threats through old experience leads to catastrophe.

Evidence

Ours is not simply a case of being ambushed and outgunned. We were caught off guard because there was no way that we could have imagined these acts of invasion and dispossession, any more than the first unsuspecting Taíno cacique could have foreseen the rivers of blood that would flow from his inaugural gesture of hospitality toward the hairy, grunting, sweating men, the adelantados who appeared out of thin air waving the banner of the Spanish monarchs and their pope as they trudged across the beach. Why have we been slow to recognize the “original sin of simple robbery” at the heart of this new capitalism? Like the Tainos, we faced something altogether new to our story: the unprecedented. And, like them, we risk catastrophe when we assess new threats through the lens of old experience. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 605

Categorization

• XREF: The Columbus analogy resonates with the earlier genocide framing; the perceptual-capture mechanism echoes Kahneman’s WYSIATI and pattern-matching biases. — connects to: More sampling of a rare risk gives false confidence right before catastrophe — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 113; A foreshortened temporal perspective blinds people to accumulating catastrophe; Unpredictability and destruction let rare attacks generate disproportionate public fear. (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Each mass catastrophe has unique conditions of possibility. #corroborates (0.82)
• Unpredictability and destruction let rare attacks generate disproportionate public fear. #expands (0.80)
• A foreshortened temporal perspective blinds people to accumulating catastrophe #corroborates (0.78)
• Low-probability high-consequence risks inflate fear and enable extreme policies #expands (0.72) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2115