1) Dismissal by statistical chance is not valid, as you don't quote the required statistics to dismiss the concrete case having been made, instead you cite an almost universal phenomenon of fear of the unknown.
Let's take his first proposition: "People afraid of strangers should also fear friends and family as statistically we are more likely to be hurt by a loved one. " The reason why we're afraid of strangers is because they are unknown by the definition of the word. The fear we feel the most is a lack of agency, an ability to change and influence our environment. While statistics may say we're statistically more likely to to be hurt by a loved one the process in which we arrive at fear is not an objective, rational analysis of the case at hand. Even if you disagree with this it is an inherent property of our evolution to veer on the side of caution when faced with something we don't know. I think fear is a perfectly valid reason to site evolutionary biology where an animal cannot be aware of exterior forces. We are not omniscient, therefore there must be a driver for us to take action in a situation we can't evaluate. We cannot solely operate on a basis of knowledge so the force of fear in the unknown accounts for that which we don't understand. It is not to say we cannot come to an understanding at the progenitor of this fear and evaluate statistical likelihood but it is to say you cannot rationally evaluate all fears to an objective standard.
No one can deny the primality of fear. A digestible analogy would be Tabula Rasa in which the precedence for all life, particularly our own species, is to comprehend the world around them. We can only know what we know, anything outside of this is beyond our scope of evaluation. That scope if the sum difference of our understanding subtracted from all information that exists in our reality. Fear is a navigation tool. Even the analogy of fear in terms of driving vs flying, people that view themselves as competent which generates an ego can invariably influence how people feel fear, so the idea of falling from a plane is a descent of powerlessness with no agency to influence the chance of survival. Compare this to a car crash: While the acceleration is probably high for a crash to occur, if it's in a car for example people would feel relatively safe. Even the idea of flying through the sky is one of mysticism: At a certain altitude all you see is clouds, the plane of perspective you've been adjusted to for millions of years which you see obstacles on the horizon or the sunrise quotient at just over average sea level is one of familiarity. In contrast, the idea of being in open spaces is scary (agoraphobia). We could give the evolutionary perspective that open spaces is a weakened position from an evolutionary perspective: We weren't precisely the most adept species in physical fitness so without concealment from predators we are uneasy. Now that we understand this, we can reject it from a logical standpoint. However, subjectivity is a core component of fear, We've inherited ancestral pictorial memories for millions of years, we've co-evolved with snakes to the degree in which we scan our environment for distortive faces, colour psychology with apiosamitism where over an evolutionary timeframe where we see colours like yellow and block which conjures an implicit caution, or an animal that categorically stinks which would diffuse the likelihood of predation on that animal. If we understood that logically we could ignore our sensorium but this is only a recent adjustment in our evolutionary timeframe: The paleo-life pre-civilization around 12,000 years ago was not a society based on extensive knowledge of recorded literary observations.
Take love for instance: Love is an implicit emotion which we feel at some point of our lives. It is not something we approach based on a logical evaluation of their utility to us, yet we can take measures to evaluate why we love someone. However, at a fundamental level we cannot describe love as it an experience. The Fear of the unknown and love are primal drives, I don't believe the human condition can be expressed objectively. We are not objective, mathematical models are perfect statistical abstractions but applying them to ourselves is taking a theoretical notion and expecting it to explain the practicalities of our behaviour. I believe this will change further into our evolutionary timeline, ancestral memories will weaken with regards to predation, perhaps it will take on a new form in the sight of exploitation.
2) same problem, if you were to cite the statistics and weigh it against the fear, you would be able to conclude that the fear is extrapolated from fear itself rather than being substantiated by statistical facts
This is correct. However, the proposition is underpinned by a few things, namely:
-An understanding of mathematical models.
-A faith in mathematics- Some people repress statistics and mathematical models, similar to saying a "Computer doesn't know everything". Ironically the precedence for this is probably they don't understanding mathematics, which leaves them to lead on faith with faith being a purely subjective approach, to which they could implicate another subjective approach to replace their faith in an unknown process (Mathematical modelling.) Fear of the unknown is implicit, a cultivates repository of associated factors that risk our existence. We co-evolved with animals, we did not co-evolve with cars. The object of a car, it's behavioural properties and the risk it places are all preceded on knowledge. Do you fear a car that's almost going to run you over because it's a car, or is it in that split second your mind doesn't go through the processes of a car and just recognises an object approaching your body at a high velocity? Cases of experience, vs that of rational evaluation (which is a posteori, after an event has occured, which you can use as a model for future encounters). If I had almost got hit by a car a few hundred times I would certainly pay more detail to the idea of it accelerating towards me, I'd evaluate the pivot of the wheels axles, the driver and their state if I could infer, I would look into their eyes to see where they were aiming, thus able to infer some objective that correlates with the direction the car will take. Instead of running I could know the direction of the car and understand if I run to a certain location I'll have a lower probability of being hit.
I'm not arguing with statistics trumping an implicit function, I'm simply stipulating that fear of the unknown is the source of all new experiences. Fear of the unknown is at the core of human experience, we only infer that something is safe due to acquiring knowledge on an entity, or as I said ancestral memories which pass on fears associated with various properties like colour, smell, geographical location, if we meet a new entity that we cannot associate with another model, i.e. The mammoth and Hominids, one of the reason given for the extinction of mammoths was because we ravaged the lands and hunted mammoths, we done this by encirculation, sticking around it and pointing it with a big stick. if it turns to face the human that poked it in the leg, the person originally facing the mammoth's trunk would strike it. Anyways, we were a co-factor in the extinction of mammoths because it didn't have the timeframe to evolve a implicit fear of humans, it saw us as we perceive a small cat. Anytime we stumbled upon a mammoth it didn't see us a threat. Mammoth's don't pay attention to that which lurks in the shadows, they were too large to conceal themselves in the bushes. A picture for representation: a prehistoric man, honing in on the mammoth:
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3) There were 1.25 million road traffic deaths globally in 2013
<p><strong>The road traffic death rate by WHO region and income level: </strong>In 2016, low- and middle-income countries had higher road traffic fatality rates per 100 000 population (27.5 and 19.2, respectively) compared to high-income countries (8.3). The African region had the highest road...
www.who.int
vs. 232 deaths in aviation
Air travel fatalities have been recorded in each of the last 16 years, with a total of 176 deaths in 2021 due to air crashes.
www.statista.com
The answer for this is among the two points above.
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Fear of the unknown is, i don't know 200 years old by now, the element of every cheap horror novel.
It is infact the precedent for all good horror novels. Horror can only exist in the minds of someone who does not understand. Any horror element holds that of mystery and uncertainty. I liked lovecraft's writings, especially Colour of Space: He read the insurgent papers on quantum mechanics at the time and found himself fearful at the notion that the universe seemed fundamentally unpredictable (at the time) and the idea that there are so many forces that govern our existence which we cannot reliably control. If you took the element of mystery out of horror you would get a risk-assessment paper, I think this point alone is sufficient to illustrate why horror needs mystery.
B) There are statistical and explanatory means of quantifying or qualifying "fear of the unknown" or, which i concern to be an entirely different subject "xenophobia", although, on the literal sense seeming identical, to be two very distinct complexes.
C) Mathematics is also infinite, should we therefore have stopped in the kindergarten, declared the pursue of discovery, experimentation and formulation of laws impossible and fruitless, also? In contrary, the physiological, logical and psychological limits of human mind dictates the limitedness of the actual matter at hand. Therefore, it is nothing but lazyness to declare that we can't know, explain, or demonstrate the functions at play.
I do not concern myself with xenophobia, just because its basis could be in primological evolutionary benefits, i.e. the likes of disease transmission which wiped out tribes of aboriginees when white europeans visited, or a means to differentiate populations into the exploitative and dominant class, it has stuck with us. That is not to say it is inevitable, rather it says that fear of the unknown regulates most people's behaviours which are separate from your own. I don't have any racial inclinations, but perhaps that is because I understand the differences in skin colour and the differences in our environment. Some people understand the reason for differences in skin colour, others do not. If they do not understand the logical reasons why skin colour is different they are left to speculation. Speculation on matters we don't know leads to fear. Evolution is not racist, it is not bound by ideological principles. The ones that intermingled with another tribe could've transmitted or received a disease, their genes were not inherited due to something like a bacterial infection.
Fear is a force, I'm not being lazy in not applying it to every conceivable context, what I am doing is simply stipulating its existence and how it is the predominant force in people's minds. We are limited in our understanding and fear of the unknown supersedes that limited comprehension. We don't need to know anything to fear the unknown, and since evolution is the survival mechanism of all life, everywhere, there exists in a truth in adapting to a fear, whether it is known or unknown to the individual. I only said it was infinite because it is the contrapositive to knowledge, since we cannot know everything it is infinite in its application. I don't see how you can refute this. I'm not even making the point fear cannot be rationalized I understand fear cannot be quantified, but this is not the question of the OP: He is asking why people do not logically fear a more probabilistic means of dying compared to a less probable one but he also dismissed the idea of irrational fears. It seems to me he was asking why people possess illogical fears that they cannot explain, but he didn't want anyone to explain by referring to the unknown. I am giving him the correct answer to explain irrationality of fears, for many fear is not preceded by logic. That is the answer to this question. Fear of the unknown is that which exists when logic is absent.
