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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> 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

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.)

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Define random. The million of poor children are randomly selected too.

> Define random. The million of poor children are randomly selected too.

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.

My guess is that Thailand wanted to be on the spotlight. There are kids dying of hunger, disease, sex-enslavement, violence or negligence (car/house accidents). But they are very unlikely to be on the spotlight.

We don't want to be humanly. We want to be praised for being humanly.

> My guess is that Thailand wanted to be on the spotlight.

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.

This is a corollary to the /r/HailCorporate mentality, where every discussion about/mention of a brand is astroturfing. Healthy skepticism is encouraged, but there's a point where it becomes FUD, and perhaps in some cases as destructive as any surreptitious marketing.

Not really; their fate is practically predetermined. As in, any child that will be conceived in those areas of the world is highly likely to die of malnutrition. We cannot similarly predict that a not-yet-conceived child will end up trapped in a cave.

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