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you are being somewhat flippant, but you are getting at something I often wonder about. why is it considered reasonable to spend so much money (and a life) to o

you are being somewhat flippant, but you are getting at something I often wonder about. why is it considered reasonable to spend so much money (and a life) to occasionally rescue a small number of people in a weird predicament? Elon musk was ready to drop about a million dollars on this problem; similarly, I often read about the US Navy retasking entire warships to respond to small maritime emergencies at an hourly cost I can't fathom. is it callous to ask whether there isn't a more efficient (from the perspective of actually helping a significant number of people) way to allocate these resources? there are a lot of lives that could be changed for way less.

ethbro 8y ago
The majority of these costs are already paid. Certainly, there are logistical costs in moving material around, but if an active US Navy ship isn't deployed on a humanitarian mission it's either patrolling or training. It's still a sizable cost, but it'd be a lot less than expected if sunk expenditures were removed.
beaconstudios 8y ago
it's not callous, and there is certainly an element of group hysteria to well-publicised threats to life like this and the Chliean miner rescue - we do not as a general rule attempt the same urgent response to greater threats to life such as malaria, starvation etc. But the difference I believe is that these incidents are short-term and can be saved by a burst of coordinated effort, whereas other causes of greater death are often structural and hard to impact without a charity's organisational efforts - for example, reducing malaria deaths is a complex web of fundraising, acquisition, distribution, education, and probably many other factors I am not aware of. A million dollars can save 13 lives now, or maybe-hopefully make an impact when added the existing pool of resources dedicated to reducing the impact of hunger or disease.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I think sometimes we abstract society too much. As always, remember that society is just large numbers of individuals. So why might you decide you want to help people in this sort of situation? It's reasonable to speculate that Musk may have had some of the following major motivators, for instance: 1) It's a fun challenge to try to solve, particularly when traditional solutions seem to be failing. 2) You get to help some people. 3) It's great publicity for you and your companies, particularly if you succeed in an out of the box way. And other people would have of course have had radically different motivations for why they chose to get involved. There's no grand overseer that found it reasonable to 'spend' or risk a life. It all comes down to completely subjective views, motivations, and value systems. So if you want to know why what any given individual would do is something they would consider reasonable, you would need to ask them. There is no right or wrong answer. In this case the diver's motivations and value determinations convinced him that this was a reasonable spot to risk his life, and he died. I expect he had no regrets and so it was, all things considered, a great way to die from his perspective. By contrast, it would be a terrible way to die from the perspective of many others. Nobody's right, or wrong. It's just different motivations and value determinations.

ethbro 8y ago

The majority of these costs are already paid. Certainly, there are logistical costs in moving material around, but if an active US Navy ship isn't deployed on a humanitarian mission it's either patrolling or training. It's still a sizable cost, but it'd be a lot less than expected if sunk expenditures were removed.

beaconstudios 8y ago

it's not callous, and there is certainly an element of group hysteria to well-publicised threats to life like this and the Chliean miner rescue - we do not as a general rule attempt the same urgent response to greater threats to life such as malaria, starvation etc. But the difference I believe is that these incidents are short-term and can be saved by a burst of coordinated effort, whereas other causes of greater death are often structural and hard to impact without a charity's organisational efforts - for example, reducing malaria deaths is a complex web of fundraising, acquisition, distribution, education, and probably many other factors I am not aware of. A million dollars can save 13 lives now, or maybe-hopefully make an impact when added the existing pool of resources dedicated to reducing the impact of hunger or disease.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

I think sometimes we abstract society too much. As always, remember that society is just large numbers of individuals. So why might you decide you want to help people in this sort of situation? It's reasonable to speculate that Musk may have had some of the following major motivators, for instance: 1) It's a fun challenge to try to solve, particularly when traditional solutions seem to be failing. 2) You get to help some people. 3) It's great publicity for you and your companies, particularly if you succeed in an out of the box way. And other people would have of course have had radically different motivations for why they chose to get involved. There's no grand overseer that found it reasonable to 'spend' or risk a life. It all comes down to completely subjective views, motivations, and value systems. So if you want to know why what any given individual would do is something they would consider reasonable, you would need to ask them. There is no right or wrong answer. In this case the diver's motivations and value determinations convinced him that this was a reasonable spot to risk his life, and he died. I expect he had no regrets and so it was, all things considered, a great way to die from his perspective. By contrast, it would be a terrible way to die from the perspective of many others. Nobody's right, or wrong. It's just different motivations and value determinations.