The universe does not and is under no obligation to care about any of us and just being angry at it is like being angry at a rock, but that is no reason for us not to care. Quite the opposite if you ask me.
I think we are responsible for making the world the best it can be for everyone because we are the only ones here who have the capacity to care about making it so.
For me:
1/ support the Grauniad [0]: the gulf between the quality of their journalism and the rest of the market is gaping. I may not agree with all their views but the world is a better place with their investigative push
2/ let's leverage the HN community: one of the constant messages I've seen in my limited time on HN is how diverse and capable the community is. Surely we can do this and more if we set our heart to it?
It may not be the most popular view at the moment but I do believe "The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Toward Justice". But this doesn't happen automatically; each of us need to push the pendulum, and a billion pushes can outweigh quite a bit of unfairness...
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/aug/24/grauni...
Anyway: the Guardian is just one paper. Support independent journalism, whether it's the NYT / WSJ / WaPo / FT / your favourite non-clickbait news platform.
How can one best support journalism, if its brokenness is systemic?
Consider a supermarket-checkout tabloid of the "UFO aliens tattooed my baby!" variety. It seems unlikely that any plausible level of resources will yield high-quality journalism. But perhaps the BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News pair is a counterargument.
Consider the NYT, with its view of the world as a competition between ideas, rather than between economic and political interests. More resources won't fix that.
Also apropos the NYT, for decades I wished for better coverage of the role of subculture group-think in governance failures. I excused that NYT's lack of it as resource limitations, and hoped for reallocation someday. Then Trump, and there was lots of coverage of group-think among his supporters, and still a dearth of it about its role among elite. Resource limitations weren't the bottleneck.
So yes, marginally better funding might yield marginally better journalism from the the Guardian / NYT / WSJ / WaPo / FT / etc. More reporters, fact checking, foreign bureaus, conferences, etc. But...
They still won't be tracking their failures, searching for root causes, and pursuing continuous process improvement. It won't change journalism's culture of obliviousness to decades of learning in other industries about how to organize processes for consistently high quality.
Is there any journalistic platform that has a plausibly modern process story, and just needs resources to flesh it out and grow? Regardless of focus - just, is anyone doing this well, who can be funded and assisted as an exemplar? Is there any journalism foundation attempting to encourage modern processes? Is there any dinky little local paper that's made a commitment to consistently record its failures in a google spreadsheet, and to follow up on what went wrong and how their process might be improved? That I could see funding.
Marginal non-transformative improvement is nice too. With society and history being chaotic, small deltas can have large consequences. But I find the current product quality demotivating without some prospect for transformative improvement.
All I can do is support the good in the world, and help those with less than me.
This story is inspiring. And I’m grateful that it was shared.
It’s great that people turn out in support of others. However, you’ve got to wonder if we’d made more of an effort over the past half century in research, many fewer people would have died prematurely. Great progress has been made in childhood cancers, for example:
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-in-children/key-statist...
20% more yearly research compounded over the last 5 decades and we might not be reading this story today.
50 years from now this person would not die in childhood from cancer.
Many fewer people did die prematurely in the last 50 years, precisely because people did the work you're wanting them to do.
The reason this story even could happen is because it's so rare to hear stories like this anymore. It's not like the middle ages where 30-50% infant mortality was common. People wouldn't have the energy to organize emotional support for every child that died in those days.
Child mortality is dropping ridiculously fast. You can't get to zero though.
Yes, the world is a much better place. Your article summarized it nicely:
“Rising prosperity, rising education and the spread of health care around the globe are the major drivers of this progress.”
My point is that more research compounded over decades would help us cure more people sooner.
I didn’t say we can cure everyone but perhaps we can make it extremely rare.