Comment by exporectomy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exporectomy | Hacker News Reader

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> The American West is burning. The Arctic is melting. Populism and authoritarianism are on the rise. Nearly a million people have died from the coronavirus. Economic inequality continues to grow, only accelerated by the pandemic.

Compared to what came a couple of generations before, all those "bad" things are either imaginary or not very serious. It's ridiculous that people are wringing their hands over them. Of course we're going to find something to worry about if there are no actual problems. That sounds like a pretty good state to be in compared to having a world war (killed 10s of millions) or HIV (killed 10s of millions) or the Spanish Flu (killed 10s of millions), or actual communist dictatorships (killed 10's of millions).

I'd say technology enabled all that good and we're living in a technological utopia which is still getting better and better. There's just some strange social effect causing people to blind themselves to the greatest achievement in the history of the Earth.

I think utopia is a really high bar. To restrict that bar to a single and simple facet of economy, I will say that a necessary condition for an economic system to be utopian, is for no one to regularly find themselves without an adequate quantity of food. However, apparently in 2020 more people died of malnutrition than any other cause. [0] I don't want to make this a long post, however I think on the basis of this fact alone, I am justified in not considering myself part of a utopian global economy.

0: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/global-nutrition-re...

Well, yes, we'll never be perfect. I'm talking about a relative improvement, but it's a huge relative improvement that we've had. The fact that you had to use malnutrition instead of starvation, shows how far we've come.

Be careful of articles that identify something as the biggest category. It's usually a trick to mislead people. Which category is biggest depends on how you choose your categories. If a person is malnourished, and that causes them to suffer worse from the flu so they die, was their death due to malnourishment or disease or a virus or the flu or the 2020 flu? Or what if there were two types of malnourishment classified separately (say lack of protein and lack of vitamins)? Suddenly neither of them would likely be number 1 because they'd both be smaller categories. The article doesn't explain any of that so it's safe to assume that it's misinformation even if technically correct in some way.

I won't disagree about a relative improvement, but that is simply not what the word utopia means. 'a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions' - merriam webster.

As for being tricked by poverty, malnutrition, etc. statistics, check out these from the UN group FAO.[0] One in nine people go to be hungry every night. That doesn't just make me think 'this isn't perfect' that makes me sick to my stomach. Can you imagine one in nine people in your group of friends and family going to bed without enough to eat? I don't find that acceptable, and while I surely owe my life to modern medical science, I find it truly galling to compare our current state of affairs to a utopia.

Or we could extrapolate from this UN report about child mortality: [1] 'At least one child dies every ten minutes in Yemen because of preventable diseases such as diarrhoea, malnutrition and respiratory tract infections.' That boggles my mind. Assuming that trend was accurate for an entire year, more than 50 thousand children would have died of preventable causes, just in Yemen, just in 2016. That is not utopian.

0: http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/1152031/icode/ 1: https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/malnutrition-amongst-c...

I won't argue about the meaning of utopia. But my point is that the world is rapidly improving and is already vastly better than ever before.

I don't understand how you can be surprised by any of those statistics you quoted. Go back 10 years, 20 years, any number of years and it was worse. Malnourishment is in decline. Have you never looked up any poverty stats before? My mother was happy to get an Orange for Christmas, and this was in a developed country. That would never happen today.

Consider what it would mean if hardly anyone died from preventable causes. What would the causes of death be instead? Heart disease? Preventable already using artificial machines if you really really didn't want to die from heart disease. What if a new super-expensive treatment was discovered. Suddenly, overnight, most of the world would be plunged into tragedy for dying from a now-preventable disease. Maybe you utopia requires no lifesaving medical advances because they will all, at least initially, be possible but restricted to only a few people.

Perhaps more people dying from preventable causes is actually a good sign because it means more causes of death are now preventable!

Dying of malnutrition in modern America is not a result of lack of access to food, it's more a consequence of other diseases, alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, etc.

America's biggest health problems come from overeating.

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