And afterall it’s the Mongolians who might starve. Any port in a storm.
Judging from a lot of HN discussions so, Americans should really understand the rwluctance of anyone to listen to people from other countries explaining how things should be done. Exihibit A through Z: every single discussion about health care or city planning. Or gun control.
Why should anyone trust every busybody's advice? If the volunteers have put their money and started a herd and proved that their herd is better managed, then it is possible to get others to follow. Giving management advice without doing it yourself is just bullshit.
Just imagine how you feel if someone, say a consultant or a agile master, shows up at your work and tells how to do your job without having any experience with it, or the environment you are doing it for. There are even multiple threads on HN every week accusing those consultants of hubris in various ways.
The only thing that shows more hubris than telling foreigners how to live is foreigners dying en masse because they refuse to change their way of life - see, America on cars or gun control.
For sure that's not just virtue signaling and youthful delusion. For sure.
I don't know the case, so yeah if it was just people without knowledge coming in and forcing it on them... ok.
At least, this person (sorry, I can not recall name) acknowledge, that it was naive and hubris!
UPDATE: I was not first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39640882 need to read whole thread before answering!
(Spoiler) The TL;DW The presenter participated in a humanitarian group to establish an agricultural project in an African community. The effort was a disaster - hippos emerge from a river and devoured all of the produce. The presenter shares his insights about how to actually help locals by asking questions instead of telling them what to do.
Anyone who spends time spreading new and improved ways of doing things I urge you to firstly continue to do so and to also realise change is gradual. Humans
And yes, that is hubris.
Also, your comment shows are very deep and troubling lack of empathy. On top of quite a large amount of ignorance.
So yes, hubris is a rather good word for that kind of behaviour.
Even if I had the urge to judge them on whether or not they were showing hubris in that situation, I would have to conclude I don't have enough information to do so.
What a strange statement. Most people in most countries aren’t interested in “working with the dirt” as their full time occupation. Are they supposed to be interested in working with dirt more than other countries for some reason, and not aim for science, tech, education, finance, arts, etc? I just looked it up, and Mongolia’s economy is around 35% mining and agriculture, with 10% of their total GDP from agriculture, which is quite a bit higher than New Zealand, so their statement seems especially ironic. The US and European economies have an even lower fraction of mining and agriculture, and aspire to get away from manual labor, especially involving dirt.
Also don’t forget it’s much easier to grow things in NZ than Mongolia: “the high altitude, extreme fluctuation in temperature, long winters, and low precipitation provides limited potential for agricultural development. The growing season is only 95 – 110 days. Because of Mongolia's harsh climate, it is unsuited to most cultivation.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolia#Agriculture
Meat was 11% of NZ export income: a huge amount more than the 1.5% for Mongolia[1]. GDP is weird, and comparing sectors or countries is hard. Comparing meat since that's closer to the topic.
> long winters, and low precipitation provides limited potential for agricultural development. it is unsuited to most cultivation
A better comparison is between the South Island of New Zealand and Mongolia. South Island latitude 41S to 47S. Mongolia latitude 41N to 50N. The South Island has "high-country farms" but yes New Zealand farming is far different from Mongolia where the country's altitude is mostly between say 800m and 1600m (along with continental weather). Our agriculture is very different from Mongolia's (and ours is variable: floods in some areas and bad droughts in other areas).
[1] Data: Mongolia Exports of meat and edible meat offal was US$19.73 Million during 2021, Mongolia of total Exports 1324.80. New Zealand had NZD77.2 billion exports, with NZD8.6 billion exports for meat and offal.
> They said most Mongolians weren’t interested in working with the dirt.
(Edit: removed inane opinion). Dissecting a second-hand sentence is pointless. Without more context, we can't know what they meant or what they were trying to communicate or the value of their opinion.
> Dissecting a second-hand sentence is pointless. Without more context, we can't know what they meant or what they were trying to communicate or the value of their opinion.
Totally agree. Sharing the second-hand sentence out of context also makes little sense, no? That was the only point I intended to make, and I should have left out the sloppy economic comparison.
More importantly it reminded me that comparing group statistics is really hard!
IE: American volunteer groups going to poor countries to build them schools.