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Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

As others pointed out already, Mongols are very polite and friendly to visitors. Even people who want to tell them how to live in their own steppes.

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"Want to tell how to live" - what a bullshit way to read the GP comment. People starved, others tried to help them not to starve. They didn't "tell them how to live". If Mongols want to live like before and starve, sure, that's their privilege, but then I'd say everyone else has done their part. It's not the job of the world to help someone who wants to suffer.

No idea when OPs story happened, but from his use of "help prepare for winter", I concluded it was before the current disaster. Pretty hard to prepare for something when you are right in the middle of it.

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.

All this depends on whether the advice was actually objectively good advice or not. Is it hubris to give someone information you think may help them? This all hinges on whether or not they decided not to take the advice because it was crap advice or because they were set in their ways too much to make use of it.

Before you give advice, you ask questions and build the necessary basis that allows you to adopt your knowledge to the particular use case. If you do not do that, you fail. You even fail with good ideas, because you do not get buy in from the people.

So yes, hubris is a rather good word for that kind of behaviour.

Sure, asking questions and building rapport helps... and we have no idea if they did that or not. We don't know how they came about giving their advice to those particular people, we don't know what that advice was, and we don't know why they refused to heed it.

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.

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