The Contagion of Concern: Game theory of how anxiety spreads
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The Contagion of Concern: Game theory of how anxiety spreads
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Re: The Contagion of Concern: Game theory of how anxiety spreads
#2Hi all, this is a follow-up to two essays:
1) The parallels between anxious ideas and immune system threat prediction (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475370)
2) The game theory of determining which imagined threats are worth our attention (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22760540).
Thoughts and feedback welcome as always :)
Re: The Contagion of Concern: Game theory of how anxiety spreads
#3I am glad someone has at least fake-formalized the infectious nature of anxiety.
Re: The Contagion of Concern: Game theory of how anxiety spreads
#4I’ve always thought anxiety is simply from different patterns of thought than people without anxiety. We can all share thoughts and fears but people with anxiety have a pattern that results in an unpleasant experience. Maybe one suffering anxiety should analyze different approaches to how one arrives at an outlook and compare to their own for maybe adapting. I’m writing with ignorance because I’ve never had bad anxiety.
Re: The Contagion of Concern: Game theory of how anxiety spreads
#5I am glad someone has at least fake-formalized the infectious nature of anxiety.
What makes this formalization fake?
Re: The Contagion of Concern: Game theory of how anxiety spreads
#6I wonder if the model here is missing something important - it assumes there is no survival penalty for a false positive attack. In real life this isn’t true. Activating a fight or flight response in humans and animals has an energy (survival) penalty.
Re: The Contagion of Concern: Game theory of how anxiety spreads
#7This an excellent short explanation for group decision dynamics. If this subject is of interest to you I strongly recommend: How We Decide https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Decide-Jonah-Lehrer/dp/0547247...
This subject, at least to me, calls into question the behavior associated with recent events. The subjects of police brutality, civil rights, systemic racism, and so forth are much older than two weeks. I appreciate there are people and groups who have been actively working for years to raise awareness of these concerns, and then there is everybody else. Many people in that second category are crazy impassioned about these subjects as seen in both HN activity as well as the protesting and riots seen in the media. If this segment of people are honestly that concerned and these subjects were clearly concerns for more than two weeks ago then were these peoples’ level of concern then? I suspect this sudden call to concern is more the result of contagious group behavior dynamics and social psychology than a premeditated cognitive concern of independent consideration.
Re: The Contagion of Concern: Game theory of how anxiety spreads
#8I’ve always thought anxiety is simply from different patterns of thought than people without anxiety. We can all share thoughts and fears but people with anxiety have a pattern that results in an unpleasant experience. Maybe one suffering anxiety should analyze different approaches to how one arrives at an outlook and compare to their own for maybe adapting. I’m writing with ignorance because I’ve never had bad anxie…
From what I've read, and from my personal experience, is that anxiety comes from negative, inward-looking and expansive understanding of events. That is, anxious people tend to assume the worst, make things more personal (maybe it happened because of me or some innate human characteristic) and let the negativity leak over into other parts of their lives (I failed at this, I'll probably fail at something unrelated).
Conversely, people who remain positive and can isolate negative news to external, transient events are less anxious and end up healthier and happier. That might be contrary to what is actually happening; evidence shows realists tend to be pessimists.
Re: The Contagion of Concern: Game theory of how anxiety spreads
#9I wonder if the model here is missing something important - it assumes there is no survival penalty for a false positive attack. In real life this isn’t true. Activating a fight or flight response in humans and animals has an energy (survival) penalty.
You are right. It would work well if the models included a utility function and, instead of measuring likelihood of survival, the measurement were expected utility.
Re: The Contagion of Concern: Game theory of how anxiety spreads
#10I am glad someone has at least fake-formalized the infectious nature of anxiety.
That's called modeling.