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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

The value depends on context. The punishment for hurting someone is much higher than the amount it takes to help someone. And spending a thousand dollars to help an anonymous person, who is in a sea of people not getting help, and will fall back into that sea soon enough, feels like tossing it into a black hole when the donation is all by itself. But if there's enough donations together, they feel more meaningful.

You're measuring value in just about the weakest possible context.

People want to make a difference that's visible when looking at the entire problem.

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> People want to make a difference that's visible when looking at the entire problem.

This sounds a lot like saying its not worth it to help one person.

More like "there is so much less value in spending money for painkillers for you today when it could be spent for a cure for everybody forever". If a dentist never pulled out a tooth and just charged for morphine now and again you'd be pissed instead of being relieved that they made you feel well just for one day. Not only do you still suffer (but with timeouts), you also payed more long term.

If everyone just takes turns pushing a boulder up a mountain eventually you'll put in more effort than if everyone pushes at once, and have almost none of the results. Sometimes being even 99% there is not enough.

I too have seen the Facebook chain letter about how we could end world poverty for only $XX billion. But yes, let's definitely not fund malaria relief in the meantime.

Besides the unwarranted and unhelpful snark, you also took the weaker interpretation of my comment so you can defend your point of view. Neither are good signs for your argument.

I said "less value" not "no value". In general there's less value in providing fragmented help in small chunks to individual people than there is in providing help via a large coordinated effort to entire populations. Even if the total is the same, the fact that it just trickled in and it lacked coordination can only hurt. I even gave an example, perhaps a better one would have been that you can't cross a canyon in 2 steps. And you won't effectively put out a big fire no matter how many cups of water you individually dump on it.

Fittingly even the example you chose is bad simply because "malaria relief" still involves quite the coordinated effort, not the least financial, not individual people independently sending small help to a single other person.

You're the one using ridiculous examples: dentists, boulders, canyons, rolling rocks up hills, pouring water on fires.

The original topic was that various charities are saving lives in measurable ways, yet most people make excuses not to contribute, preferring to spend their money on additional luxuries for themselves.

Thank you for providing excellent examples of those excuses.

> I said "less value" not "no value".

Value is subjective, you're just expressing the preference that there is less value to you.

> In general there's less value in providing fragmented help in small chunks to individual people than there is in providing help via a large coordinated effort to entire populations.

Only in the aggregate if less help is delivered. If the same amount of help gets there then the value is potentially the same, or more (or less).

> Even if the total is the same, the fact that it just trickled in and it lacked coordination can only hurt.

This is not true, the individual nature allows for more flexibility in meeting everyone's actual needs. "one size fits all" usually doesn't.

> And you won't effectively put out a big fire no matter how many cups of water you individually dump on it.

This is an inapt metaphor, probably because its physically false.

> Fittingly even the example you chose is bad simply because "malaria relief" still involves quite the coordinated effort, not the least financial, not individual people independently sending small help to a single other person.

Actually there are people sending malaria nets over there, the coordination problems you speak of are already solved.

Defensible if spending is appropriately directed or directed to savings/investments with that intended goal, but getting the Forester Touring vs the Forester Premium? That's 3 kids and it's hard to make the case that this argument applies.

> More like "there is so much less value in spending money for painkillers for you today when it could be spent for a cure for everybody forever".

exactly! my suffering as an individual is simply not significant enough to motivate you.

> If a dentist never pulled out a tooth and just charged for morphine now and again you'd be pissed instead of being relieved that they made you feel well just for one day. Not only do you still suffer (but with timeouts), you also payed more long term.

I'd be especially pissed if he refused to pull my tooth on the grounds that other people would still suffer from toothaches.

> If everyone just takes turns pushing a boulder up a mountain eventually you'll put in more effort than if everyone pushes at once, and have almost none of the results. Sometimes being even 99% there is not enough.

If few people are willing to pay the cost of an incremental solution then how are we proposing to convince them that the much greater cost of a large scale solution is worth it?

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