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Comment by kombookcha | Hacker News Reader

Do you genuinely believe that when people say "we have very pressing issues about preventable human suffering", that they're saying "we should literally bring all forms of suffering to absolute zero before we do literally anything else"?

Personally I simply don't know of anybody who actually hold that view, because it's obviously a nonsensical way to approach the issue. I do however keep seeing people strawman it into existence to dunk on it with the exact points you typed out here. What is being achieved by insisting that perfection is impossible, therefore we shouldn't try at all? Just the comfort of not having to think too hard about it?

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How else should anyone answer that? Whatever improvement are done (and you can't deny that there are continuous improvements), a person with that view will always find that "more" could be done. They don't actually say that they want perfection, but actually that's the same as always saying "more could be done".

We are already preventing 99% of preventable deaths. As you say, most ‘preventable deaths’ we prevent just turn into a new later more creative preventable death. In many cities you can be homeless and have better mortality prevention than a medieval king.

I don’t know how people think that we’ll draw a line somewhere clear. It is (and should always be) a moving target.

I think most progress has this moving goalpost. Because of this, we need to multitask as a civilization. We can’t just focus on ‘safety is number 1’… because we’ll never do anything else.

> We are already preventing 99% of preventable deaths.

How did you measure this?

Honestly a mental swag. To put actual numbers in it, life expectancy was 20 years, now 80 years.

That means roughly 0.9% chance a of death per year now, vs 3.4% ancestrally. Thats 73% of deaths avoided per year. I think that compounds year over year since those people who would otherwise have did are also alive to avoid more deaths.

So, even at the indisputable low end… 73%.

Your claim above:

> We are already preventing 99% of preventable deaths.

Makes an implicit claim of optimality on an absolute basis. What you posted here doesn't even try to prove that claim, at best it only proves a relative improvement.

I have to say, this just reads as a thought-terminater happening on your end - we evidently live in a world where even people who strongly believe more should be done to stop human suffering ARE RIGHT NOW engaged in doing all kinds of other stuff not directly going towards preventing that, including assigning non-negligible amounts of resources to said stuff. Obviously the opposition is a question of the relative perceived scale of the expense of X to other problems Y, rather than literally wanting an indefinite Achilles-and-turtle race to perfection.

It's not that we can't do more than one thing, it's that if we are gonna devote massive amounts of resources to some grand scale project, there are disagreements about what's more pressing.

Now personally I do believe becoming interstellar should be one of our shared goals, and that it will be good for us (and the rest of the biosphere) long term. However, I really think that "nevermind the starving kids they will die anyway, it is what it is, focus on space instead" is gonna actively deteriorate our chances of ever getting anything done because it comes off as deeply detached and cruel.

You know what would be a tangible benefit of automated asteroid mining? Making child-powered cobalt mines obsolete in a flash, and full-stopping the environmental devastation of stripmining on earth. These are vastly better selling points than "there is no such thing as zero suffering".

> this just reads as a thought-terminater happening on your end

That's exactly what it is. Not just that "more could be done" is always true, but it's irrelevant at the same time, because what they propose - taking resources from space agencies and sending truck-loads of food - won't do any good to those children. It will probably just fuel more war and terrorism and more schemes to divert those money to opaque bank accounts in some tropical country.

> It's not that we can't do more than one thing, it's that if we are gonna devote massive amounts of resources to some grand scale project, there are disagreements about what's more pressing.

Can't just ignore a project because it's not "pressing". And, btw, it IS pressing. We have 50 year of oil left with no alternative that is nearly as good as diesel. Do you tink that mankind can support a grand scale project after that?

> [...] is gonna actively deteriorate our chances of ever getting anything done because it comes off as deeply detached and cruel.

More cruel than it is now? More cruel than current wars and genocide (you know which ones, I won't name them). People already don't care, except for having their iSomething to brag about. How many children were exploited for all the copper in those devices? Did the buyers care? How many people went to buy FairPhone instead?

I think a big project like this is the only thing that can still unite most of the people. I hope China does it first so we could have a race again, like it happend in the 60's.

> You know what would be a tangible benefit of automated asteroid mining? Making child-powered cobalt mines obsolete in a flash, [...]

Yes, but people still won't care.

> Now personally I do believe becoming interstellar should be one of our shared goals, and that it will be good for us (and the rest of the biosphere) long term. However, I really think that "nevermind the starving kids they will die anyway, it is what it is, focus on space instead" is gonna actively deteriorate our chances of ever getting anything done because it comes off as deeply detached and cruel.

Your intuition is correct, but there's even more reasons that that. I will use a movie clip to introduce what I would try to do if "we" "decided" to set off on an unnecessary interstellar voyage prior to taking care of people (particularly children) here on Earth first:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdcE3VyKv5U

And why would I do this?

a) bfytw - https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=BFYTW

b) Some other reasons that are more well thought out

Humans would be well advised to not forget (or, learn in the first place) that it is MUCH easier to wreck things than it is to build them. I recommend "measuring twice and cutting once", as my grand daddy always told me.

PS: I should really try to be not such a pessimist/asshole, so I will also include this clip from the same movie as a counter-balance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et4sMJP9FmM

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