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Comment by aripickar | Hacker News Reader

Undernourished != starving, and 821.6 million != 1 billion. While there is plenty of work to do left, theres a lot of progress that has been made so far and its important to recognize that.

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Feel free to mentally substitute “has access to anything less than enough food” and round up slightly, but I don’t see much of a difference.

"round up slightly" by >100 million humans?

You don't see a difference?

The point being made is that human civilization is making leaps and bounds globally because that number isn't a billion, and most importantly it has a strong, predictable trajectory downwards, towards zero.

"I don't see a difference" is like saying "we were going 80 mph towards the wall, and we braked, but now we're going 50, and I don't see much difference, it's practically 80 if you just round up." Are you not interested in the fact that we're continuing to brake?

thing is, you won't see much of a difference if you hit a wall with 80 or 50 (mph/kmph)

You absolutely will. In a modern car, at 50kmph you'll be largely ok. At 80kmph (50mph), not so much, but maybe you'll survive. At 80mph, you won't survive.

Figure 3.3 in [1] suggests that a belted driver has a 40% chance of survival in a full frontal crash at 50 mph. At 80 mph the survival changes are close to zero.

[1] https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...

This entire sub-thread should be deleted. But to those replying "there is a difference between crashes at 50 and 80!", while that may be true, please just realize that the casual parent comment was simply not being very articulate in what they were trying to say.

Using the actual numbers from the discussion we would create an analogy of crashing at 100 or crashing at 83, in which case there actually would be very little difference in the distribution of outcomes.

I really wish HN would take a moment to try to be more intellectually honest in our commenting. sigh

Bad analogy. the difference between 800m and 1b is 20%. The difference in energy between 50 and 80 is 156% (kinetic energy is relative to velocity squared).

I think the point is that the gains are largely irrelevant. Sure, its great 100 mil less people are hungry, but if you look at the trend, we've gone almost nowhere. Not helped by the fact that, there seems to be a variability of about 50 mil. Why? Are we under-reporting? Are we not addressing the right problem?

If you have variability of 50 mil and only 100 mil gains, its really hard to make the case that you qualitatively improved anything, it could be nothing more than a statistical anomaly (maybe there was more rainfall or less competition from local wildlife), and whatever you're doing is not working at all - assuming you are doing anything.

This is pretty different from 50 mph vs 80 mph - that's a ~40% improvement, and we can point at something to show the improvement.

We have added quite a few billion since 2000, so there's an argument to be made that we are making more food, but the ~1 bil number staying fairly stable to me points to a systemic issue, not merely a problem with food distribution.

FWIW, I see the difference. I agree that rounding up by 180 million is not rounding up but changing the numbers. I also agree that "undernourished or starving" is not the same as "starving".

But I do agree that perhaps it isn't an as strong victory as aripickar claimed.

The global population has gone from 4-and-a-half to almost 8 billion humans within my lifetime. No, I don't see a difference :)

All the more reason to be impressed that less people starve today then in 2000 and that the trajectory continues to move downward. Also, the world does not have an overpopulation problem. It has a (in most ways highly political) access to adequate resources that are actually available problem for marginalized populations. The overpopulation and population control narrative is not only based on bad assumptions, it's also implicitly racist in favor of western, prosperous societies because, guess which parts of the world have the higher child birth rates for the time being? (and those dropping too by the way).

Are those words actually weighted with the assumption you are making, or are you just trying to feel better about 800 million people going hungry? The nuance between English words aren’t really apparent in poverty statistics. Because I doubt there was a survey where they all agreed it wasn’t enough, but just enough that aripickar doesn’t feel as bad about 800 million going hungry.

I meant that there was a group of people the size of the population of brazil that were expected to be hungry, but are not. That should be celebrated. Its easy to lose the sheer size of the difference between 800 million and 1 billion, but in reality thats a huge difference.

Again, its very easy to cherry-pick statistics, and point at a big number and say "oh this is great we helped people". True, but if you didn't actually fix the root cause it doesn't mean much. Contextually for ~30 years the number has stayed pretty stable, despite 2 billion in growth. So we clearly are capable of producing tons of new food, but we're pretty bad at managing that growth - or by the numbers the extra 1.9 billion we managed to feed would have more than covered the billion gap, no?

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