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Everything today is better then yesterday and tomorrow everything will be better then today (on average on a global a scale for all the issues you pointed out).

by doikor 10y ago

Everything today is better then yesterday and tomorrow everything will be better then today (on average on a global a scale for all the issues you pointed out). Progress is being made all the time. But the news/media mostly just reports the failings/problems/issues (sells better) so it feels like everything is getting worse. (There are some looming issues on the horizon like climate change etc. which might change this course in the future.)

erikpukinskis 10y ago
My morality doesn't work in terms of averages. "Better on average" doesn't equate to "good enough" to me. It's a way for people to make themselves feel better about doing violence. I am responsible for countless murders due to living a normal American lifestyle. The fact that previous Americans were responsible for a higher number of murders doesn't make that go away. There are quite possibly more slaves today than there have ever been. The fact that there are more non-slaves too doesn't cancel that out for me. We are the first generation with the information processing tools to cut these problems down by orders of magnitude in a couple decades. The faster we do the more lives will be saved. If we make the same incremental improvements our parents generation did, we will have failed.
- simonh 10y ago
  > My morality doesn't work in terms of averages. "Better on average" doesn't equate to "good enough" to me.... Nobody is expecting it to. But do you know why poverty, disease, hunger and slavery are at far lower levels compared to historic norms? It's because at the global scale we are enormously richer than we have ever been before. We can afford multi-billion dollar programs to fight diseases such as Ebola, HIV, Malaria and the many others we have actually eradicated. We have huge reconstruction and investment programs for developing countries. Space technology, including satellite communications systems, GPS and weather monitoring are revolutionizing third world agriculture and market economies as well as saving lives. A richer and more prosperous world is also a world better able to tackle the problems you quite legitimately raise.

by doikor 10y ago

erikpukinskis 10y ago

My morality doesn't work in terms of averages. "Better on average" doesn't equate to "good enough" to me. It's a way for people to make themselves feel better about doing violence. I am responsible for countless murders due to living a normal American lifestyle. The fact that previous Americans were responsible for a higher number of murders doesn't make that go away. There are quite possibly more slaves today than there have ever been. The fact that there are more non-slaves too doesn't cancel that out for me. We are the first generation with the information processing tools to cut these problems down by orders of magnitude in a couple decades. The faster we do the more lives will be saved. If we make the same incremental improvements our parents generation did, we will have failed.

simonh 10y ago
> My morality doesn't work in terms of averages. "Better on average" doesn't equate to "good enough" to me.... Nobody is expecting it to. But do you know why poverty, disease, hunger and slavery are at far lower levels compared to historic norms? It's because at the global scale we are enormously richer than we have ever been before. We can afford multi-billion dollar programs to fight diseases such as Ebola, HIV, Malaria and the many others we have actually eradicated. We have huge reconstruction and investment programs for developing countries. Space technology, including satellite communications systems, GPS and weather monitoring are revolutionizing third world agriculture and market economies as well as saving lives. A richer and more prosperous world is also a world better able to tackle the problems you quite legitimately raise.