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Comment by alexandercrohde | Hacker News Reader

Not to sound insensitive, but I think some of the worlds problems are caused by the fact that it's easier for people to get emotional about a specific incident they can put a face on than a systematic problems.

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While I totally agree, it also seems to me that this sort of thinking is almost always used as an excuse not to care about anything, rather than a call to care more about the bigger stuff too.

>it also seems to me that this sort of thinking is almost always used as an excuse not to care about anything

Caring is overrated. Unless one does something about what they care for, it's not just useless but also harmful (e.g. stressful to the person caring with no effect towards solving the problem).

How about we care AND do small things to help?

That doesn't fall into the "useless care" case. But that's also not 99% of caring for stuff in the news.

That’s fine, but be honest about it. Don’t use the fact that people care more about personal stories as an excuse.

Caring is not overrated if it's shared between a group of people and that group of people realizes it's a group of people.

Well I'm not sure you can discard a point because people tend to use it wrong.

If somebody doesn't want to care about something the "reason" they give is likely not important, at the end of the day it's an emotional decision. If you want to make people care about something, I recommend offering them a situation where they can sleep better at night when they care.

That’s kind of my point. When you remind people that they’re caring more about the tragedy of one person than they care about the tragedy of millions, you’re not helping them to sleep better. You’re just shaming them, and the result is likely to be that they’ll care less about both, rather than more about the millions.

No reason to 'think' that, incidents involving a single person do tend to generate a stronger emotional response.

"The statistics of large-scale killing don't convey emotion"

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/11/09/6661503...

The death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.

This reaction is well understood by the media. When they want to humanize an issue they will go to great lengths to dig and find relatable and shocking ways to tell a story. That they do not is more telling about the interests of the people that fund them, all billionaires that profit from mass suffering and the exploitation of labor and vulnerable populations.

When discussing a teenage girl being auctioned off on facebook, that does kind of come across as just a wee bit insensitive and prefacing it with 'not to sound insensitive' doesn't in fact assuage that in any measurable way.

Single incidents sparking outrage are a force in society that we are not going to get rid of any time soon. The last thing we need is people outraged over an incident of slavery to be told to be apathetic, as the people who help promote it, which now apparently includes facebook, aren't going to suddenly be all reasonable if everyone shouts less about single incidents. While the solutions that are required may be structural, everything ever complained about is an incident.

Then again, a whole lot of us know someone got sold too.

Nail the fuckers somehow. That is not OK.

Isn't this evolution at play? Getting emotional over every large scale systemic issue we encounter would overwhelm us, so the larger the numbers the more we dehumanize?

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