If I were going to name some Biggest Problems? Hrm.
A whole lot of people have mentioned fear. I think that's one of the biggest ones, from freakouts like you link to there to the fact that people are so terrified of even the slightest risk to anything that swings and merry-go-rounds are getting banned all over the place. It also covers most of the side-effects of it, particularly the tribalism that someone mentioned elsewhere in the comments.
Ignorance is kind of an unfair one to list; coming up with that one as a major problem is like shooting fish that are already lodged in the gun's barrel these days. It causes a lot problems itself, but the main one it's responsible for is fear. Stuff gets banned at the first hint of problems because people don't understand how risk works. Email forwards convince people vaccines are deadly, so the neighbors decide to treat their kid's cancer with homeopathic "medicine." Science gets generally stigmatized because people get their perceptions of it from contemporary science fiction movies and not The Real World. That kind of thing.
My main pet peeve, though, is the fact that foresight is pretty much stigmatized. Anything that involves any kind of long-term planning or consideration is a non-issue, both because We Need Instant Gratification and because such things are generally considered bad for various silly reasons, in and of themselves. A lot of issues going on these days aren't going to be fixed with a hastily-written law or a couple of marches or by bombing a country into the ground. Fixing a lot of problems facing the planet or any particular country in it is going to take years or decades or generations of work in quite a few cases, and I think that's going to be a problem until people learn that it's not wrong to think further than two years ahead.
no subject
A whole lot of people have mentioned fear. I think that's one of the biggest ones, from freakouts like you link to there to the fact that people are so terrified of even the slightest risk to anything that swings and merry-go-rounds are getting banned all over the place. It also covers most of the side-effects of it, particularly the tribalism that someone mentioned elsewhere in the comments.
Ignorance is kind of an unfair one to list; coming up with that one as a major problem is like shooting fish that are already lodged in the gun's barrel these days. It causes a lot problems itself, but the main one it's responsible for is fear. Stuff gets banned at the first hint of problems because people don't understand how risk works. Email forwards convince people vaccines are deadly, so the neighbors decide to treat their kid's cancer with homeopathic "medicine." Science gets generally stigmatized because people get their perceptions of it from contemporary science fiction movies and not The Real World. That kind of thing.
My main pet peeve, though, is the fact that foresight is pretty much stigmatized. Anything that involves any kind of long-term planning or consideration is a non-issue, both because We Need Instant Gratification and because such things are generally considered bad for various silly reasons, in and of themselves. A lot of issues going on these days aren't going to be fixed with a hastily-written law or a couple of marches or by bombing a country into the ground. Fixing a lot of problems facing the planet or any particular country in it is going to take years or decades or generations of work in quite a few cases, and I think that's going to be a problem until people learn that it's not wrong to think further than two years ahead.