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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Saying "society needs to care more" is the last stop before the final destination of "this can't be done". Getting great many people to coordinate on something that's beneficial to them long-term, but carries an (even insignificant) short-term cost is one of the hardest (if not the hardest) things to do, out of all the things humans ever tried.

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I don't think calling out 'society needs to care more' as bullshit means we collectively throw up our hands and walk away. It means we recognize that 'getting many people to coordinate on something' just plain isn't going to happen as the primary mode of addressing these issues and instead work on solutions that do work.

For a subset, sure, maybe a good PR push gets people sufficiently inflamed about a particular topic, but does that mean that key problems that aren't 'viral' enough aren't deserving of a proper solution? If "society needs to care more" is the answer, then that's the implication. But that's obviously wrong.

I interpret "society needs to care more" as a challenge: what can we do to make society care more? Put another way, I view this as a collective action problem.

The classic solution to collective action problems is to have the government take care of it.

But here, the government is probably the biggest offender. You'll pry their databases and TSA inspections from their cold, dead hands.

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