alt Hacker NewsWeird psychological quirk: otherwise banal articles seem much more pertinent when they happen to be nearby (I just read about a random plane crash from decades ago but felt very invested in it, due to proximity).
Wonder if this is related to the biological phenomena of humans tending to care more about humans who resemble themselves than those who don't (homophily)
I don't know if that is a psychological quirk - it seems pretty rational to me. We are more affected by events that happen close to us than those that happen far away, so instinctively finding local events more interesting than distant ones seems like what I'd expect[0].
[0] Not that my expectation has any weight, I have close to zero knowledge of psychology.