caryoscelus:~#

This “definition” does sound a lot like “phobia”, but perhaps the most important difference here is that “phobias” are supposed to be inherently irrational, caused by a trauma or even being natural (such as fear of heights, perhaps). By contrast, “paranoia”, even if it may ultimately be considered irrational, is more likely to be caused by exaggerated imagination mixed with otherwise rational thinking.

But that’s from the perspective of someone who uses this word deprecatingly (most likely to describe others). It may also be occasionally used by people to describe themselves without negative connotations (similar to how some copyright-ignoring people may proudly call themselves “pirates”). This may of course complicate the matters, since other people labeled as “paranoid” would argue against such word usage.

So for simplicity sake, lets skip over how the word should be used and rather concentrate on the core of “normies vs paranoics” debate. Which essentially boils down to whether the aforementioned fears, anxieties or precautions are rational or irrational. It is, of course, a matter of personal taste, knowledge and considerations, but recently i have come to conclusion that there might be a common fundamental issue dividing these camps.

It is attitude towards probabilistic nature of our knowledge about universe. From the typical point of view of normies, paranoics exaggerate probability of some bad event. But while that can certainly be true sometimes, that is not necessary: paranoic and normie may come up with the same probability evaluation, and still react differently.

Lets say there’s 0.1% chance of dying (just to be dramatic) in the course of some activity. That’s not that much, or is it? Overwhelming majority of people would survive it, so you may consider it worth taking the risk. On the other hand, one of a thousand is going to die. Imagine thousand people together, and then one of them dies: it’s not that hard to see that it can very well be you. Or even imagine it on a world population scale: people who would die could populate a big city. But then again, you probably had that risk in your life and survived it already… Any number of arguments can be brought to support either point of view.

And with this, we come to another point: calculation of outcome probabilities can be rational, but what about actual decision-making that would take in account these probabilities? What kind of criteria can we possibly use to determine whether certain decision is rational or not? If somebody decides that the probability of dying vs probability of getting huge money prize is 50-50 and after cold considerations takes the risk, can you really call that irrational? Is it even rational to value your life? Most people would probably say it is, but on what grounds?

There are, of course, cases when one can say one decision would be more rational than the other: e.g. when A leads to all good outcome probabilities be higher and all bad outcome probabilities be lower than B. But where do you see these in practice? Usually people can’t even actually estimate probabilities, let alone stumble upon such rare cases.

So in practice, there is no way to objectively judge rationality of a decision. It is only possible after learning all personal priorities and assumptions used to come with it, but usually that’s not even attempted.

Hopefully, this perspective may help people on either side to better understand each other rather than be content with convenient labeling.