We can comprehend 13 people and the struggle against nature, while the scope of world hunger is far too complex and emotionally incomprehensible to mobilize enough people.
Billionaires like Bill Gates. Countless volunteer aid workers with organizations such as MSF.
Fact #1: Since 1960, child deaths have plummeted from 20 million a year to 6 million a year. [1] This was posted quite recently here on HN. Perhaps you missed it.
At the end of the day, the problem of child poverty and the death and suffering it causes is an enormous one but we are making progress on it. Could we do better? Yes. Could we do worse? Oh yes, way way worse.
[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Max-Roser-three-facts...
... without forgetting the holocaust a year that is still happening.
It’s so easy to forget how nasty Spanish flu, small pox and polio was. My grandfather has stories where they would burn people’s houses/huts with the people alive inside if they had contracted the disease. It was brutal. A curse that would wipe an entire enpire.
http://www.newsweek.com/now-good-news-poor-are-getting-riche...
So they are probably (well, not probably)... they ARE going to have more kids whether you like it or not.
The question becomes how do we (Western society, which has more resources than we know what to do with) address the issue and try to do good in the world.
Be involved in how your governments and MNC's behave in these countries. These entities are more likely to pay attention when you, as a voter or customer with more disposable income, say something compared to the citizens of poorer countries who have less of a voice.
It's a natural response to the hardship. If the chance that the kid make it is 10%, then make 10 times more kids. That way you have around 100% chance that your lineage makes it through life.
In other words: In a society where 90% of children die and women have 10 births, one third of the mothers will lose all. All assuming the deaths are independent of course.
In poor countries children are your retirement savings, so at an individual level having more children is a rational decision. In many cases they aren't having more kids than they can afford--they can't afford not to have more kids. Even at a national level it's not clear that lowering birth rates without additional changes would help a country economically.
We shouldn't turn to ideals in an effort to ignore or abdicate responsibility in dealing with the reality we are given.
I'm only 25 so I don't know how I'll feel in 10-20 years, but right now this is part of my consideration when thinking about long-term goals and whether I'd want to have kids at some point. I might, so for that eventuality, plan B is to adopt. Plan C is to have one (and only one) kid, which already turns two parents into one descendant, so that's better than nothing.
The only thing I'm worried about is that smart families will do this and the stupid ones produce six. It's in the education and not in the genes... but it's also in the upbringing, and if they're brought up with the mentality of the kind of people who currently get six kids...
Do they die of malnutrition or governmental corruption? I thought it was proven in the 1980's that the problem isn't a lack of food, it's the degenerate political systems blocking aid from reaching those who are dying. At least that's the prevailing narrative on reddit.
When a million people died in the Irish potato famine, it wasn't just because the United Kingdom prevented foreign aid from reaching Ireland. Ireland was the breadbasket of the empire - throughout that entire time, it was a net exporter of food.
1. Food is free for the starving in many places around the world.
2. Where it isn't free, a meal of rice and beans is usually within reach of even the poorest.
3. Where it is out of reach of the poor, it may be due to corruption; ie North Korea redirecting food supplies to the army instead of the public, and withholding it from prison camps.
Don't fixate on the price or you'll miss the forest for the trees.
It is the handiwork of the rapists that beget these children.
These are different disasters. The cave impacted 13 random children. Hunger impacts millions of poor children. One is random, the other more predictable.
There are utilitarian arguments for numbing oneself to tragedy which predictably strikes those without resources while defending those visited by random misfortune. (Note: I am not arguing for this utilitarian calculus. Just describing it.)
Coarsely, what happened to these kids could happen to ours. Starvation, less likely. In-group selection is built into our natures, and that is on display here.
Practically, saving these kids takes a short burst of effort. Their families will pick up the slack thereafter because they have—on average—the resources to do so. Saving children from hunger takes long stretches of coördination, together with efforts to ensure their education (to prevent the problem from repeating in the next generation).
It is cruel, and there is probably a solution. But the analogy between these problems is flawed. With minimal assistance, the cave children will become self-sustaining again. That is not true for the chronically hungry.
We don't want to be humanly. We want to be praised for being humanly.
I need to coin a term for this concept, I see it on every Hacker News thread once it reaches a certain size. It is the attribution of the topic to some nefarious intention of a dude in marketing. Once you start noticing it you can't unsee.
Intel fires their CEO? It's a PR stunt.
Startup abandons Europe due to GDPR? PR STUNT!
AlphaZero beats professionals at Dota 2? You guessed it, it's just PR for oligarchy parent Alphabet.
I see this so often now it's becoming humorous. As if some how this being all about PR explains everything. It doesn't explain anything! Although I'm sure Bill over in marketing loves that he has subsumed the historical role of deity in explaining the unknown.
When you try to get a kid out of a cave there is at least some hope of lasting success.
When you have a small group dying of hunger because of a drought, it is easy to perceive what to do and your ability to realize it. So people are more likely to speak up.
If a drought affects an entire nation, you're at least aware this must be a complicated task. So you're more reluctant to criticize inaction.
That behavior is especially problematic when the solutions are abstract or long-term.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad society found a way to save them, I just wish we took the every day threats to human life more seriously.
Because for better or worse, that’s not how most money is redistributed.
What do Thai Navy divers do? If there's no war on, they're probably training. What better training than a live rescue mission? I.e. the wages for those highly skilled Thai teams have probably been paid down already.
Similarly international forces benefit from co-operation because it's something they would want to do anyway: good will, training in co-operation, skills training.
As for volunteers their time is hardly a cost in the same way. But if you're a cave diving medic, the expected utility of using your time to save people in a cave is probably better than working and donating to a charity.
Failing to save these kids is the case you want to think about - that would be sending the message to the public that if your kid gets lost in the mountains we're not going to save them. Sure this particular "insurance claim" (in this impromptu parlance) was an expensive one, but most of the others aren't, and the thing about insurance is that it is there particularly when the costs are catastrophic.
We can help the 13 because government is not the cause and there is nothing to undo, we cannot help the 3.1 as easily because it would take either removing the government in power to putting the 3.1 in further jeopardy trying to fix it. So the real question becomes, when will the world recognize that some small countries need outside governance to see to the needs of their people. Right now sovereignty is absolute unless the nation in question threatens a neighboring country.
Bill Gates and tens of thousands of aid workers globally. The Chinese Communist Party and businessmen who outsource labor from the overfed first world to the underfed third world are by far the biggest help. Also your aunt who volunteers at the soup kitchen. Often these efforts funded by donations or aid grants (tax money, paid by you and me) from our democratically elected governments.
>We can comprehend 13 people and the struggle against nature, while the scope of world hunger is far too complex and emotionally incomprehensible to mobilize enough people.
Most of us can comprehend two (or more!) things at once. People are extremely mobilized about ending hunger and we have made strides against this in the last century: https://slides.ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-food-provision/
A few hundred people showed up to the cave for a few weeks. Tens of thousands show up to fight hunger every day.
Now off to the Gulag!
https://www.smh.com.au/healthcare/obesity-a-bigger-problem-t...
It's simply under-developed and has not become industrialized. When American or European children were dying at higher rates it wasn't because their parents were selfish. It reflected the rate of development of the continent.
Hunger was an issue after World War II in most of Europe, and the US came to their aid. The hunger there was not due to parents being selfish either.
If there is no food to spare, then all the money in the world won't solve the problem. If there is food to spare and people let children starve to death, then people are evil. (edit: there technically exists a third potential that there is absolutely no means of delivering food, but at that point, any discussion is pointless)
EDIT: I suppose this idea makes people uncomfortable because it implies that those same people might be evil even though they don't see themselves as evil. We all want the world to be a better place, but we don't want to be inconvenienced. Rather than do something, we give a few dollars in hopes of absolution. Writing posts about starving kids is easy. Moving 100LB bags of food 12 hours a day in Sudan is much harder. "Be the change you want to see in the world"