I've always been perplexed and dumbfounded by this to the point where it had a really bad effect on my life because I just couldn't believe that it's happening, in a sense my life was on hold. I couldn't believe that people don't understand the simplest things in life, that my own parents or brother or friends don't seem to care at all. I grew up with them at the same time after all, it didn't make sense to me. Even back in school when we were clearly not learning anything and the whole system was a joke, nobody said anything. Nobody cared. To me it was obvious that it can't be an IQ problem, they are human and go through the same systems as me and it doesn't even require intelligence to understand. What I ended up realizing much later is that people intentionally don't care and they intentionally make an effort not to know better. It's an optimization strategy that people develop consciously and subconsciously so that they don't have to do any more work, don't run into more risk, don't offend etc. They literally just give up while outwardly keeping up the pretense of caring.

I noticed the same thing that the article writer noticed: You can point out obvious problems to the exact person responsible for them and they will agree with you and later they still don't fix it. They just don't care, it's like you mentioned some geographical fact about a town in South Africa to them. A normal person would call this psychopathic behavior but now it's the human norm. I decided to cut people out of my life that don't care [about anything except themselves] because obviously there is just no point in interacting with them. To be honest, that's almost everyone in society. They are self benefit machines, hyper optimized for their own wellbeing. Fine, be a machine then but don't be surprised when I recognize you for what you are and I don't start playing tetris where the only outcome is benefit for you.

It's also sad how even in this thread on hackernews almost everyone disagrees with the author and they keep claiming that people do care about some stuff and it's okay and we are all human after all and so on. I want to emphasize: You aren't supposed to have to care about everything. But some people do in fact have jobs and specific duties and they are paid to care about them and still don't do it.