Call me selfish, but I personally don't worry about the future of humanity in thousands of years. I'm sure most people don't either.
A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me. Sure, people can feel concerned about his fate, just as people can feel concerned about a stranger in a foreign country, but most people just don't. We're all selfish bastards.
I still feel a deep discomfort from the idea that people could just be okay with people suffering. Obviously this is more acute with people in other countries than people who do not yet exist, and I have some allowance for laziness. But... people are genuinely fine with the idea that people starve to death? That's horrifying.
This represents improvement.
The question is before you even start throwing the moral gauntlet on other people, what are you doing about it? Now you might be doing something but then the question is whether you are actually doing something about it.
There are plenty of arguments for why ex. doing NGO work or sponsoring a child is doing more harm than good and actually hurting. So I wouldn't be so fast to cast judgement.
I don't think you find many people who don't care about other people suffering intellectually. The question is whether they are choosing to suffer more others to suffer less.
First off I'm not making a moral judgement, and I'm not talking about actions at all. I'm not even trying to judge them at all. They made an assertion about humanity and i find that assertion alarming, but i didnt try to reflect it on them and stayed as impersonal as I could.
Its the intentions i was concerned about, not the effects. They were describing people who dont even care intellectually- thats freaky to think about.
But future people don't exist. If a nuclear holocaust wipes us all out, they will never exist, and hence will never suffer. So really it depends on whether you consider "the continued existence of the human race" to be a moral imperative or whether you don't.
[1] http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html/
(Of course, experiencing others' emotions can in general be debilitating. Obviously, then, experiencing trillions of others' emotions would be trillionsfold worse.)
I'm not thinking of personally being aware of them and i can even rationalize not finding strangers to be tangible. I understand the bystander effect and all that. There are any number of ways I can accept not doing anything, but the idea that someone could legitimately just not care is deeply unsettling.
Like, for the bystander effect to apply a person has to care and then think "someone should do something". Its the idea that someone can instead just not care even superficially that is disturbing.
To me, the idea that someone think "someone should do something" about that "something" is disturbing.
But this is HN, the place where those that make $100k/year a more wax poetically about the plight of poor people in third world countries while munching on the cheese and drinking the wine thinking that it is the waxing that counts.
Progressing beyond this is one of the important moral challenges faced by humanity.
There has been no evolutionary pressure to develop much of a concern beyond one or two generations.
And evolution hasn't equipped us with reward pathways or cognitive capacity to solve many of the problems now facing us and our surroundings - because those problems are new
I believe humanity could survive longer if people only cared enough to prepare for disasters they know will come, even if it's multiple generations into the future. This is like humanity is one big human procastinating. Some things can only be accomplished if you prepare for them with time.
Well, how many years ahead are you willing to worry? 10? 100? It sounds like you might be saying that you don't put much weight on the future of humanity on any timescale, and worry only about things that affect you personally. If so, then yes, I'd say that is the definition of selfish.
I'm sure most people don't either.
It might look this way, but what makes you sure that this is true of "most people", rather than just some people in some societies?
We're all selfish bastards.
I don't think this is true.
Let me reverse the question : how many years ahead is enough for you not to worry? A million years? Fifty billions? Do you worry about the ultimate fate of the universe[1]?
It's pretty clear to me that, all other things being equal, events tend to matter less and less as they are occurring further and further into the future. That's why, for instance, most young people don't worry much about death, unless they're told it will happen soon.
I don't have an accurate way to measure it, but to me, once you start talking about thousands of years, it's such a far future that I don't worry about it.
> but what makes you sure that this is true of "most people",
People are anxious or obsessed about many things, but I very rarely hear anyone whining about the future of the World in geological time scales. There is of course the famous exception of the young Woody Halen in Annie Hall[2], but it's a comical scene precisely for this reason : most people don't worry about these stuff.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe
A fair question. I'm not worried by the heat death of the universe, as I'm fairly certain that any action I take during my life will have no effect on it. I can't really picture the difference between a million years and a billion, so they don't really concern me, although I don't have a logical explanation for this.
My actual concerns vary between the 100 to 10,000 year time frame. I'm periodically incapacitated by my inability to find a convincing counterargument to the Great Filter theory, whereby the reason we haven't ever ever encountered aliens is because all civilizations collapse before achieving interstellar travel. While I'm doubtful that I can personally do anything to prevent this eventuality, when I do have hope, it's that I can make it slightly less likely or less catastrophic.
There is of course the famous exception of the young Woody Halen in Annie Hall[2], but it's a comical scene precisely for this reason : most people don't worry about these stuff.
Thanks for the link, although I find it more bittersweet than straightforwardly humorous. Having had similar failed conversations with psychological professionals over the years, I sympathize with young Alvy. I can say from experience that trying to explain your concerns about the 1000 year time frame doesn't go over any better.
The climate change bandwagon is joined only by tiny Europe and some parts of America. We Indians or our Chinese neighbors don't care much about global warming and will never care of course unless until we can guilt trip the rich nations into giving us money to do something in that case it is a good deal at the expense of people like you.
India + China is approx 1/3rd of world population. I think that should qualify for "most people".
Its also one of the reasons, why i like family fathers and mothers so much- even though most of them vote conservative. There is something selfish, that wants to see that the selfishness last forever. Thats why those future persons need a spokesman, a long term selfish bastard/algorithm, who is able to veto on short-term behavior that is ultimative self-destructive.
The problem here is, that with such a control mechanism, its easy to go idealistic and try to "patch" humanity up while your at it- ending up with something, somialhinn, socialism. So the patching up process, known as government, needs a reality check to prevent a run-a-way - and balances, to prevent a lock-out of the living from base resources and short term solutions on the way to long term solutions. Some flaws might be unfixable, and only work arounds will prevent them from flaring up again and again.
For example i can not get this generation to worry about the earth of tomorrows temperature.
The obvious solution would be to have a Future-Gen-House-of-Parliament veto on all usage of coal and oil. Leading to a total standstill. Thus the future-gen, could be bargained with- give us oil for another generation, and we will trade you in Carbon-Emission-Taxes and the development of fusion.
I dont claim to have a answer here, but it would be nice if there was some modeling software on how to build a better government here- including a simulation on how to reign in corroding elements like financially well endowed industries and tax-strained voters.
There is quite a bit of mental variation. One of the rarest qualities I have found in people is the ability to connect abstractions to feelings. I once dated a woman who would sometimes get angry at me because she was mistaken. That is fine, as we are all human, sometimes one makes mistakes. However, she would stay angry at me even when I exonerated myself factually. I should've taken that as an early sign and bailed out of that relationship much sooner!
When hiring someone for a startup or choosing a co-founder, I would recommend that one look for this quality.
This is related to something I heard on "Fresh Air." The author of this book had a "bad boss" character who kept on calling things a "dog whistle." As far as he was concerned, a phenomenon he couldn't directly perceive might as well not exist. Such an idea strikes me as a degree of idiocy that makes me angry. The physical phenomenon of sound waves at higher than 20 kHz is a physical fact! Denying the truth of an objective fact because of a shortsighted prioritization of one's limited subjective point of view -- this is exactly the kind of thing that can get one in trouble, if one is doing substantive knowledge work!
Everybody's different, it doesn't do well to derive generalizations of society from your own internal conclusions.
> A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me.
And if treated with a modicum of attention and love, it will be much wiser than you before it even enters school. Rationalizing having given up, and pretending everybody has, comes way after that.
When someone says that I ask them "Have you donated everything you made this month above the poverty level in your country to some kids who can't afford to eat say in Bangladesh per chance or its equivalent?" They typically respond with a "No" followed by a very convoluted explanation why it is the empathy that matters as in their view situational empathy should stop the moment such actions inconvenience them.
> the moment such actions inconvenience them
That's "not even silly", the threshold for "inconvenience" begins way earlier. And "caring for others" doesn't mean not caring for oneself, I'm also one of those other people, if you will. And your need to somehow disprove the empathy, love and/or generosity of everybody else, with such cheap sophistry to boot, says more about you than about the people you know nothing about. If you're looking for convolution, you might want to also look into that.
And why does caring for others only requiring those who get oppressed, and not attacking their oppressors? Give a man a fish, and he has a fish. Denazify the world and he has a place to raise kids in. Everybody has their own views what caring and doing good means, and comforting a bullied person ranks way lower for me than dealing with the bully. I wouldn't answer "no" and squirm, I'd laugh in your face.