10 ms·

The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

162 points by sebg 4y ago

m463 4y ago
I enjoyed the book "The Rational Optimist" by Matt Ridley which is (surprise) optimistic :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rational_Optimist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rational_Optimist
sparker72678 4y ago
Nice to read something that isn’t hopeless, and isn’t fluff.
vitorbaptistaa 4y ago
If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling. He spent his later years trying to educate the public on the realities of the world. This book contains a series of tips on how to understand facts. His TED talks are masterpieces as well.
- senectus1 4y ago
  absolutely agree. Hans Rosling was amazing for presenting data in a visual and easy to digest way. Was very sad when he passed away back in 2017.
  - mongol 4y ago
    Indeed. And additionally, I have often wondered what opinions and impact he would have had during the Covid pandemic
- Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
  I really enjoyed Factfulness and in general enjoy his work and talks. But I would recommend also reading some of the criticism it received. Some really interesting discussions came from the publishing of that book
  - klft 4y ago
    Could you share some entry points to the criticism?
    - martinrf 4y ago
      A great paper [1] (published by Linköping University) criticizes the book's unbalanced optimism and bias: "Factfulness actually employs a biased selection of variables, avoids analysis of negative trends, and does not discuss any of the serious challenges related to continual population growth. A policy based on the simplistic worldview presented in Factfulness could have serious consequences." [1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328759928_Good_Things_on_the_Rise_The_One-Sided_Worldview_of_Hans_Rosling_Translation_of_an_essay_published_in_Kvartal_Sept_20_2018_httpskvartalseartiklarbra-saker-pa-uppgang-roslings-varldsbild-ar-ensidigt-pos https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328759928_Good_Thin...
      - Tarsul 4y ago
        But wasn't one of Roslings main points that we should strive to make Africa wealthy so that they get fewer kids? (Because the richer the country, the less kids are born) So basically his whole point was that he wanted to stop this unsustainable population growth in Africa. Or am I misremembering?
        slothtrop 4y ago
        Also improving access to contraceptives and fighting potential taboo surrounding it. PSI is one charity whose purpose is to improve access to healthcare services including that.
- Balgair 4y ago
  Here's a quick quiz from his team on how you understand your world: https://upgrader.gapminder.org/ https://upgrader.gapminder.org/ I was surprised at how the world is doing.
  - polishdude20 4y ago
    Some of these questions really depend on context. They give you usually three numbers and the right answer is usually either the highest or lowest number. For example, it asks how many women are CEO's in a America? And it gives the choice of 5% , 10% and 18% . The right answer is 18% which then makes you feel like 'oh that's a lot'. But I think the sentiment would be different if it started at 18% being the lowest. The result and how you feel about it changes.
joe_the_user 4y ago
If we're talking the general state of the world... The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed. The world isn't going to be much better until climate change is addressed - if then. I think this trumps literally any statistical measure of well-being you could come up with.
- Winsaucerer 4y ago
  > The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed. The world has been getting better, and continues to get better. Unfortunately, I don't have a reference to it, but I recall attending a talk that charted out some kind of measure of wealth/welfare/well-off-ness based on various climate change scenarios. The thing that stood out to me was that even on the worse climate change predictions, future generations will STILL be better off than us. Just not as better off as they would be with better climate change action. Whether or not the data used in that talk was accurate, I'm optimistic about the future, and I think it will be better, with peaks and troughs on the way there. I'm glad to have been born no earlier than I was, and would prefer to have been born later than I was! The main thing that concerns me is that it's going to be the poorest people in the world that will suffer as a result of climate change. I think that's where climate action should be directed primarily -- aimed at either preventing the great harms that will affect the poorest, or compensating them for the harms that can't be prevented, so that the harms of climate change are spread more fairly among us.
  - throwanapple 4y ago
    Has the world also been getting better for other species we share the planet with? https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    I’m always skeptical of economic models of the present let alone the future. Past performance is not indicative of future results and all economic models have very poor prediction performance over longer terms because of this. Black swan events completely eclipse and wipe out any growth that was sustained over the longer term. If we miss something in the forecast that results in a rapid ecological collapse, then reality will look different. Additionally, a slowing down of progress is actually a worrying sign if it’s driven by pushback from our world. The reason is that even if we stopped all human CO2 emissions, climate change would continue to get worse because it takes time for the climate to stabilize. And we’re not at net 0. We’re still pumping out more each year than any other in the past and we’re just starting to level off the acceleration of that growth. My point being here that even if one or two might be slightly better, three or four might be slightly worse and the downward slope from there is significantly faster (easier to increase entropy than decrease it). The only thing that gives me the tiniest bit of hope is that two generations of progress is a significant amount of time for scientific breakthroughs. If we can really unlock our green energy production (which we can with nuclear fission today and hopefully fusion not too far off) and get our sequestration up by many orders of magnitude (which with fission and fission we could conceivably enable but there are other logistical roadblocks), then we might be able to unwind some of the damage. Some damage will be permanent obviously. Still, I think betting on that outcome is a fool’s wager. The outcome scenario of a loss is quite bad. Much better to try to arrest the damage as hard as possible now.
Barrin92 4y ago
>But this fact – that it is possible to change the world and achieve extraordinary progress for entire societies – is something that everyone should know. Everyone does know that. That the world changes, gets better or gets worse isn't exactly a hot take. What these 'progress studies' are about is ideological in nature. It's using 'the state of the world' which nobody cares about as a means to re-frame local issues, which people do care about. I mean the article is even quite explicit at the end that what it's really about is selling 'effective altruism' as a belief system. However instead of pretending that this is some value-neutral question of 'data' as if the average European or American citizen doesn't know that Somalia is poorer than France (or could theoretically be less poor) is kind of silly.
darth_avocado 4y ago
> The world is awful. The world is much better. A better way to look at this is that we've made significant progress when it comes to solving some of the problems, but we've also created new ones that make it much worse than before. We can now grow enough food to feed the world (although we're doing a terrible job of distributing it to the world). However the food is much less nutritional and much more toxic than before. We can now travel distances in a time that was unimaginable before, but we breathe the poison as a direct result of it.
- nostromo 4y ago
  > although we're doing a terrible job of distributing it to the world Are we? Starvation and malnutrition used to be common and is now rare. https://ourworldindata.org/famines https://ourworldindata.org/famines
  - tomnipotent 4y ago
    This is true, but it's also true that the world produces enough food such that no ones needs to starve, and yet people still starve. A quarter of food produced ends up in landfills (Europe estimates 20% food waste, as high as 30-40% in US).
    - imgabe 4y ago
      Some food should be wasted. If 100% of food were consumed, that would mean that any slight disruption would result in not enough food, or that we were already in a state where there is not enough food. Wasting some food is better than having food shortages. Much better.
      - tomnipotent 4y ago
        We've built a society that's so litigious that companies are incentivized to recommend throwing away food even if there's less than a 0.01% chance of food-borne illness. Our waste is in part out of fear of getting sued or sick, but I'm not convinced the waste is the lesser of two evils. Food poisoning sucks, but it's survivable. Unlike starvation. A good example of this caution is eggs and refrigeration, for which American's and European's have opposite ways of handling things.
deleted 4y ago
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jillesvangurp 4y ago
I'm only 47 years old. I've lost count of the number of things that improved exponentially during my life time. More has happened in the last half century than in all of humanity before that in terms of scientific progress. Perhaps a different way to look at things is that while people are causing no end of trouble for each other, the planet they live on, etc. they also have a knack for just continually figuring out how to do things better and differently. People don't get exponentials so they get caught by surprise by them even when they shouldn't. People can be fatalistic when faced with big problems. But when faced with smaller problems, they just start solving them. And lots of big problems can be broken down into lots of small problems. A big problem may seem insurmountable. A small problem is just work that needs to be done. Lots of people working on lots of small problems, means a lot of those problems simply get solved and melt away. I don't have all the answers when it comes to world peace, clean energy, hunger, child mortality, sea level rises, etc. These are really big challenges. But I'm an engineer and solve problems for a living. A can-do attitude goes a long way to just getting stuff done. A wise lesson that I picked up in some communication training is to try to steer workplace discussions towards being constructive rather than being dismissive, argumentative, and negative. By simply talking about challenges rather than problems you can rephrase things such that people start thinking about how they can make things better rather than how hopelessly bad they are. They get excited instead of angry. Using a "yes and .." instead of a "yes, but .." is a very subtle way to say the same thing in a way that is constructive. In a workplace, prolonging a bad thing serves no purpose so getting people to talk about how to improve a thing is more productive than having them provide endless reasons why a thing cannot, should not, or must not be done. Get people to think about how they can do it better rather than talking each other out of doing constructive things. I can't fix everyone around me but I can fix how I voice my own criticism. That little lesson has served me well over the years. As a startup CTO I have to be constantly mindful about the epic amount of shit I cannot possibly deal with while still making sure things get better month to month. For any twenty problems, pick two to solve right now. Ignore the rest. I can't afford apathy or fatalism. Neither is constructive. But I can park one thing and focus on a feasible thing. Once I solve that, we can see about the other thing. My attitude to all the big problems in this world is the same. Yes they are big but there is progress and plenty of opportunities for more progress. Don't tell me how royally screwed we all are, tell me how things could be better and I might be able to do my little part to get us there.
BrandoElFollito 4y ago
Is there a consensus on this organization (givewell.org)? I donate to French organizations I know and see their work directly, but have no experience with international ones such as this one. I would be most interested in ones that provide education capacities to girls but the one from the post concentrates on health related ones (which is of course great as well)
- Zhyl 4y ago
  Give Well is a research organisation that publishes reports on the effectiveness of charities. They do select a 'Top 9' of best charities for a range of issues, and also run a 'donation index' where you can allow your donation to be distributed to the top charities (purportedly without a fee being taken). I've heard of Give Well being mentioned on various Stats podcasts (e.g. the BBC's More or Less) and Our World in Data is very reputable.
- benjaminclark 4y ago
  In my corner of the world/philanthropy discussion, I'd consider GiveWell one of the most well-known organizations and with a reputation of high quality, thorough research. In terms of charity evaluators who focus on the impact per dollar spent, I'd have a hard time thinking of anyone comparable. Regarding what type of programs GiveWell currently recommends, they do evaluate a wide range of types of programs. For instance, here is a page on their website summarizing some of their work on education: https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/education https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/ed.... However, with the facts as they exist in the world today, their analysis is that for a given amount of funding, more good can be done with certain specific health interventions.
- atlasunshrugged 4y ago
  I think Givewell is excellent if your goal is to donate to charities that have been vetted for maximum impact (measured in terms of cost-effectiveness of dollars donated to saving lives) but if you are looking for a charity in a specific sector outside of one they have judged, they're not the best for that. But if you're a founder by chance, founderspledge.com supports people in figuring out where to donate based on their interests (and also publishes some of their research).
revskill 4y ago
The world is aweful because the economic and political system is aweful. They're aweful because they're run by aweful people, who should spend time on something else rather than being a bad leader. And they're aweful because of the world is aweful.
- miffy900 4y ago
  > The world is aweful because the economic and political system is aweful. They're aweful because they're run by aweful people, who should spend time on something else rather than being a bad leader. And they're aweful because of the world is aweful. Is there a reason you're spelling it that way?
  - revskill 4y ago
    Because when things get better and awesome, this sentence is still true, "aweful" mean both awful and awesome, depends on the context.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Instead of getting cause and effect backwards over and over again maybe one should think that the reverse is true instead? It is so easy to blame politicians because that means you get to blame someone else. What if the economic system is broken to begin with and the only thing you can do is shift the suffering away from your interest group to another interest group? In other words, the economic system itself has created interest group politics. From that perspective having better leadership is irrelevant. Not even a centrally planned economy can be the solution since it can only shuffle the suffering around. What is the underlying problem? Increasing your personal share of wealth without creating new wealth aka rent seeking. If politicians were merely in the business of getting rid of rent seeking, their "competence" would hardly matter.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    > Not even a centrally planned economy can be the solution A centrally planned economy has the worst track record in history. It definitely won't be the solution.
TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
There is a severe lack of competent and inspiring leadership. With no clear vision for the future people become trapped in pointless political squabbles. What makes life worth living for you?
- js2 4y ago
  My wife. My kids. My siblings. My cousins. My parents. My dog. Coffee. Bourbon. Ice cream. Scrambled eggs. The smell of baking bread. The smell of fresh rain. A walk on a sunny day. Sex. A really satisfying crap. Movies. People watching. A funny joke. A bad joke. Puns. A good story well told. The stars at night. The sound of cicadas. A hawk screeching overhead. The beach. The mountains. A friendly smile. A hug from a friend. A hug from a stranger. Jitters at the start of a marathon. Elation at the end of a marathon. A symphony orchestra. That guy playing guitar at the John Lennon garden in Central Park. But yes, competent and inspiring leadership is good too.
  - agentwiggles 4y ago
    Cheers to all that and may you experience it all many more times!
- agensaequivocum 4y ago
  Doing God's will.
  - epsteinisntdead 4y ago
    Why can't God take care of that himself?
    - arbitrary_name 4y ago
      Because he's a weird insecure psychopathic man-child. Don't give him enough gratitude? Eternal suffering. Break one of the weird rules he apparently really cares about (but then allows his most trusted disciples to break)? Eternal suffering. Succumb to the biological drivers that are inherently within us? Yep, more eternal suffering. I would say you can't make this stuff up, but...
pmoleri 4y ago
The statements are true. Period. There's no need to imagine a place where all three overlap, they are already true. Specially since the last one is just a possibility.
birksherty 4y ago
It's too selfish for humans to say world is better. Is the world only for humans? Does it belong to us only? Every other species is in terrible condition than before or they got extinction. And the better is not going to last. All the progress is because of extreme fossil fuel usage. The effect has started to show, to be honest it's going to get much worse in coming decades. It's like a person falling from a building says life was never so exiting while going down each floor, even just before hitting the ground.
- mandmandam 4y ago
  Why are you booing him; he's right. While the article immediately addresses the acceptance of both awful and fantastic changes, it doesn't address our effect on the other species of the planet - which has been rather unambiguously horrific. On a scale that's basically impossible to comprehend without lifetimes of study across diverse fields. This needs to be addressed more. Every hour of every day, until we have accountability for the people responsible and genuine changes. I want our future to be one that respects the biosphere and all species, not just one. It's not just altruistic either - we've lost so much already, and people don't even know.
  - slothtrop 4y ago
    > It's not just altruistic either Then it's factored in to the "is the world better for humans" category
    - Nevermark 4y ago
      Yes, "the world is better" should ideally include the impacts of today's decisions, not just today's direct response to previous factors. But the example of childhood death statistics doesn't include any analysis of how today's actions are setting up future childhood safety issues regarding plastics, climate change, overfishing, water shortages, etc.
- perrygeo 4y ago
  Exactly. The article claims that the world is "better" because we have improved child mortality rates. They state (correctly) that the improvement is a consequence of alleviating poverty and improving material living conditions. But how did we DO that? Did we just put our heads down and chant "economic growth for everyone"?! No. This growth was, and will continue to be, driven by industrial capital, mining, and fossil fuels. How are children born today going to raise grandchildren in the likely decline of those advantages? And there must be a discussion of the costs: pollution, climate change, resource depletion, species extinction, and myriad other social and environmental externalities. Are things really "better" if more kids are born... into an unsustainable system? I think the younger generation today is ALREADY seeing the cracks, getting less from the system while paying higher costs to buy in. The energy-blind adherence to growth at all costs is a philosophy that does a disservice not just other species on earth, but future humans as well.
fallingfrog 4y ago
I’ve often thought that if you drew a line with the witch burning dark ages at one end, and a society where everyone can achieve their true potential at the other end, we’re somewhere close to the halfway point now. Massive progress made, massive progress still to be made. So yeah I’d agree with all three statements.
- TheCoelacanth 4y ago
  To be pedantic, the peak time period for witch-burning was in the Early Modern period (15th-17th century), not the Dark Ages (5th-10th century)[1]. In the Dark Ages, church and civil authorities often took the position that witchcraft didn't exist, while later on they tended to give the idea more credence. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt
stuckinhell 4y ago
I have a hard time believing the fundamental problem is the world is "culture". After Covid-19 and a personal battle with Toxoplasmosis, I think people need a reminder of the unforgiving brutality of nature and evolution. The Toxoplasomsis parasite infects over 800,000 persons each year in the United States. We are finding out our models were wrong, and this parasite can cause cysts and behaviorial modification(probably via hormones) in human brains. No one talks about this, and I only found out because this parasite was giving me polycystic ovary syndrome! It's all an absolute nitemare, and a great awakening about how these parasites violate our bodies and minds. I think Evolution is the biggest enemy that we as humans must overcome with technology.
- azekai 4y ago
  >I think Evolution is the biggest enemy that we as humans must overcome with technology. I would ask for clarification on this point. Is it that blind, unguided evolution is our biggest enemy? Or how parasitic infections are so well-evolved to exploit our biological weaknesses? Evolution is adaptation to environment over time, the capacity for change. Claiming that evolution as an enemy seems about as useful as raging against the sun or oxygen.
jwarden 4y ago
This is the theme of Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now. It compiles a tremendous amount of data and research on progress in health, wealth. justice, equality, and happiness. It is a great antidote to the distorted pessimistic view of reality that comes from constant exposure to news, social commentary, and political activism, which focus relentlessly on the negative. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now
- nickersonm 4y ago
  I personally preferred The Better Angels of our Nature [0] as a deeper look focusing on the assorted statistics. Enlightenment Now recycles a lot of it and summarizes. There's some minor updates as well. [0] https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-nature https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-natu...
- jfengel 4y ago
  Thank you. It's very good to have the affirmation of a fellow straight, rich, white man that everything is hunky-dory. We can just take everybody a standard deviation or two off from the median, and just chop those tails off, neat as pie. Now everybody is doing great and we don't have to think about the negatives at all!
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Warning: specious venn diagram.

162 points by sebg 4y ago

m463 4y ago

I enjoyed the book "The Rational Optimist" by Matt Ridley which is (surprise) optimistic :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rational_Optimist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rational_Optimist

sparker72678 4y ago

Nice to read something that isn’t hopeless, and isn’t fluff.

vitorbaptistaa 4y ago

If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling. He spent his later years trying to educate the public on the realities of the world. This book contains a series of tips on how to understand facts. His TED talks are masterpieces as well.

senectus1 4y ago
absolutely agree. Hans Rosling was amazing for presenting data in a visual and easy to digest way. Was very sad when he passed away back in 2017.
- mongol 4y ago
  Indeed. And additionally, I have often wondered what opinions and impact he would have had during the Covid pandemic
Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
I really enjoyed Factfulness and in general enjoy his work and talks. But I would recommend also reading some of the criticism it received. Some really interesting discussions came from the publishing of that book
- klft 4y ago
  Could you share some entry points to the criticism?
  - martinrf 4y ago
    A great paper [1] (published by Linköping University) criticizes the book's unbalanced optimism and bias: "Factfulness actually employs a biased selection of variables, avoids analysis of negative trends, and does not discuss any of the serious challenges related to continual population growth. A policy based on the simplistic worldview presented in Factfulness could have serious consequences." [1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328759928_Good_Things_on_the_Rise_The_One-Sided_Worldview_of_Hans_Rosling_Translation_of_an_essay_published_in_Kvartal_Sept_20_2018_httpskvartalseartiklarbra-saker-pa-uppgang-roslings-varldsbild-ar-ensidigt-pos https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328759928_Good_Thin...
    - Tarsul 4y ago
      But wasn't one of Roslings main points that we should strive to make Africa wealthy so that they get fewer kids? (Because the richer the country, the less kids are born) So basically his whole point was that he wanted to stop this unsustainable population growth in Africa. Or am I misremembering?
      - slothtrop 4y ago
        Also improving access to contraceptives and fighting potential taboo surrounding it. PSI is one charity whose purpose is to improve access to healthcare services including that.
Balgair 4y ago
Here's a quick quiz from his team on how you understand your world: https://upgrader.gapminder.org/ https://upgrader.gapminder.org/ I was surprised at how the world is doing.
- polishdude20 4y ago
  Some of these questions really depend on context. They give you usually three numbers and the right answer is usually either the highest or lowest number. For example, it asks how many women are CEO's in a America? And it gives the choice of 5% , 10% and 18% . The right answer is 18% which then makes you feel like 'oh that's a lot'. But I think the sentiment would be different if it started at 18% being the lowest. The result and how you feel about it changes.

joe_the_user 4y ago

If we're talking the general state of the world... The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed. The world isn't going to be much better until climate change is addressed - if then. I think this trumps literally any statistical measure of well-being you could come up with.

Winsaucerer 4y ago
> The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed. The world has been getting better, and continues to get better. Unfortunately, I don't have a reference to it, but I recall attending a talk that charted out some kind of measure of wealth/welfare/well-off-ness based on various climate change scenarios. The thing that stood out to me was that even on the worse climate change predictions, future generations will STILL be better off than us. Just not as better off as they would be with better climate change action. Whether or not the data used in that talk was accurate, I'm optimistic about the future, and I think it will be better, with peaks and troughs on the way there. I'm glad to have been born no earlier than I was, and would prefer to have been born later than I was! The main thing that concerns me is that it's going to be the poorest people in the world that will suffer as a result of climate change. I think that's where climate action should be directed primarily -- aimed at either preventing the great harms that will affect the poorest, or compensating them for the harms that can't be prevented, so that the harms of climate change are spread more fairly among us.
- throwanapple 4y ago
  Has the world also been getting better for other species we share the planet with? https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity
- vlovich123 4y ago
  I’m always skeptical of economic models of the present let alone the future. Past performance is not indicative of future results and all economic models have very poor prediction performance over longer terms because of this. Black swan events completely eclipse and wipe out any growth that was sustained over the longer term. If we miss something in the forecast that results in a rapid ecological collapse, then reality will look different. Additionally, a slowing down of progress is actually a worrying sign if it’s driven by pushback from our world. The reason is that even if we stopped all human CO2 emissions, climate change would continue to get worse because it takes time for the climate to stabilize. And we’re not at net 0. We’re still pumping out more each year than any other in the past and we’re just starting to level off the acceleration of that growth. My point being here that even if one or two might be slightly better, three or four might be slightly worse and the downward slope from there is significantly faster (easier to increase entropy than decrease it). The only thing that gives me the tiniest bit of hope is that two generations of progress is a significant amount of time for scientific breakthroughs. If we can really unlock our green energy production (which we can with nuclear fission today and hopefully fusion not too far off) and get our sequestration up by many orders of magnitude (which with fission and fission we could conceivably enable but there are other logistical roadblocks), then we might be able to unwind some of the damage. Some damage will be permanent obviously. Still, I think betting on that outcome is a fool’s wager. The outcome scenario of a loss is quite bad. Much better to try to arrest the damage as hard as possible now.

Barrin92 4y ago

>But this fact – that it is possible to change the world and achieve extraordinary progress for entire societies – is something that everyone should know. Everyone does know that. That the world changes, gets better or gets worse isn't exactly a hot take. What these 'progress studies' are about is ideological in nature. It's using 'the state of the world' which nobody cares about as a means to re-frame local issues, which people do care about. I mean the article is even quite explicit at the end that what it's really about is selling 'effective altruism' as a belief system. However instead of pretending that this is some value-neutral question of 'data' as if the average European or American citizen doesn't know that Somalia is poorer than France (or could theoretically be less poor) is kind of silly.

darth_avocado 4y ago

> The world is awful. The world is much better. A better way to look at this is that we've made significant progress when it comes to solving some of the problems, but we've also created new ones that make it much worse than before. We can now grow enough food to feed the world (although we're doing a terrible job of distributing it to the world). However the food is much less nutritional and much more toxic than before. We can now travel distances in a time that was unimaginable before, but we breathe the poison as a direct result of it.

nostromo 4y ago
> although we're doing a terrible job of distributing it to the world Are we? Starvation and malnutrition used to be common and is now rare. https://ourworldindata.org/famines https://ourworldindata.org/famines
- tomnipotent 4y ago
  This is true, but it's also true that the world produces enough food such that no ones needs to starve, and yet people still starve. A quarter of food produced ends up in landfills (Europe estimates 20% food waste, as high as 30-40% in US).
  - imgabe 4y ago
    Some food should be wasted. If 100% of food were consumed, that would mean that any slight disruption would result in not enough food, or that we were already in a state where there is not enough food. Wasting some food is better than having food shortages. Much better.
    - tomnipotent 4y ago
      We've built a society that's so litigious that companies are incentivized to recommend throwing away food even if there's less than a 0.01% chance of food-borne illness. Our waste is in part out of fear of getting sued or sick, but I'm not convinced the waste is the lesser of two evils. Food poisoning sucks, but it's survivable. Unlike starvation. A good example of this caution is eggs and refrigeration, for which American's and European's have opposite ways of handling things.

deleted 4y ago

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jillesvangurp 4y ago

I'm only 47 years old. I've lost count of the number of things that improved exponentially during my life time. More has happened in the last half century than in all of humanity before that in terms of scientific progress. Perhaps a different way to look at things is that while people are causing no end of trouble for each other, the planet they live on, etc. they also have a knack for just continually figuring out how to do things better and differently. People don't get exponentials so they get caught by surprise by them even when they shouldn't. People can be fatalistic when faced with big problems. But when faced with smaller problems, they just start solving them. And lots of big problems can be broken down into lots of small problems. A big problem may seem insurmountable. A small problem is just work that needs to be done. Lots of people working on lots of small problems, means a lot of those problems simply get solved and melt away. I don't have all the answers when it comes to world peace, clean energy, hunger, child mortality, sea level rises, etc. These are really big challenges. But I'm an engineer and solve problems for a living. A can-do attitude goes a long way to just getting stuff done. A wise lesson that I picked up in some communication training is to try to steer workplace discussions towards being constructive rather than being dismissive, argumentative, and negative. By simply talking about challenges rather than problems you can rephrase things such that people start thinking about how they can make things better rather than how hopelessly bad they are. They get excited instead of angry. Using a "yes and .." instead of a "yes, but .." is a very subtle way to say the same thing in a way that is constructive. In a workplace, prolonging a bad thing serves no purpose so getting people to talk about how to improve a thing is more productive than having them provide endless reasons why a thing cannot, should not, or must not be done. Get people to think about how they can do it better rather than talking each other out of doing constructive things. I can't fix everyone around me but I can fix how I voice my own criticism. That little lesson has served me well over the years. As a startup CTO I have to be constantly mindful about the epic amount of shit I cannot possibly deal with while still making sure things get better month to month. For any twenty problems, pick two to solve right now. Ignore the rest. I can't afford apathy or fatalism. Neither is constructive. But I can park one thing and focus on a feasible thing. Once I solve that, we can see about the other thing. My attitude to all the big problems in this world is the same. Yes they are big but there is progress and plenty of opportunities for more progress. Don't tell me how royally screwed we all are, tell me how things could be better and I might be able to do my little part to get us there.

BrandoElFollito 4y ago

Is there a consensus on this organization (givewell.org)? I donate to French organizations I know and see their work directly, but have no experience with international ones such as this one. I would be most interested in ones that provide education capacities to girls but the one from the post concentrates on health related ones (which is of course great as well)

Zhyl 4y ago
Give Well is a research organisation that publishes reports on the effectiveness of charities. They do select a 'Top 9' of best charities for a range of issues, and also run a 'donation index' where you can allow your donation to be distributed to the top charities (purportedly without a fee being taken). I've heard of Give Well being mentioned on various Stats podcasts (e.g. the BBC's More or Less) and Our World in Data is very reputable.
benjaminclark 4y ago
In my corner of the world/philanthropy discussion, I'd consider GiveWell one of the most well-known organizations and with a reputation of high quality, thorough research. In terms of charity evaluators who focus on the impact per dollar spent, I'd have a hard time thinking of anyone comparable. Regarding what type of programs GiveWell currently recommends, they do evaluate a wide range of types of programs. For instance, here is a page on their website summarizing some of their work on education: https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/education https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/ed.... However, with the facts as they exist in the world today, their analysis is that for a given amount of funding, more good can be done with certain specific health interventions.
atlasunshrugged 4y ago
I think Givewell is excellent if your goal is to donate to charities that have been vetted for maximum impact (measured in terms of cost-effectiveness of dollars donated to saving lives) but if you are looking for a charity in a specific sector outside of one they have judged, they're not the best for that. But if you're a founder by chance, founderspledge.com supports people in figuring out where to donate based on their interests (and also publishes some of their research).

revskill 4y ago

The world is aweful because the economic and political system is aweful. They're aweful because they're run by aweful people, who should spend time on something else rather than being a bad leader. And they're aweful because of the world is aweful.

miffy900 4y ago
> The world is aweful because the economic and political system is aweful. They're aweful because they're run by aweful people, who should spend time on something else rather than being a bad leader. And they're aweful because of the world is aweful. Is there a reason you're spelling it that way?
- revskill 4y ago
  Because when things get better and awesome, this sentence is still true, "aweful" mean both awful and awesome, depends on the context.
imtringued 4y ago
Instead of getting cause and effect backwards over and over again maybe one should think that the reverse is true instead? It is so easy to blame politicians because that means you get to blame someone else. What if the economic system is broken to begin with and the only thing you can do is shift the suffering away from your interest group to another interest group? In other words, the economic system itself has created interest group politics. From that perspective having better leadership is irrelevant. Not even a centrally planned economy can be the solution since it can only shuffle the suffering around. What is the underlying problem? Increasing your personal share of wealth without creating new wealth aka rent seeking. If politicians were merely in the business of getting rid of rent seeking, their "competence" would hardly matter.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > Not even a centrally planned economy can be the solution A centrally planned economy has the worst track record in history. It definitely won't be the solution.

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago

There is a severe lack of competent and inspiring leadership. With no clear vision for the future people become trapped in pointless political squabbles. What makes life worth living for you?

js2 4y ago
My wife. My kids. My siblings. My cousins. My parents. My dog. Coffee. Bourbon. Ice cream. Scrambled eggs. The smell of baking bread. The smell of fresh rain. A walk on a sunny day. Sex. A really satisfying crap. Movies. People watching. A funny joke. A bad joke. Puns. A good story well told. The stars at night. The sound of cicadas. A hawk screeching overhead. The beach. The mountains. A friendly smile. A hug from a friend. A hug from a stranger. Jitters at the start of a marathon. Elation at the end of a marathon. A symphony orchestra. That guy playing guitar at the John Lennon garden in Central Park. But yes, competent and inspiring leadership is good too.
- agentwiggles 4y ago
  Cheers to all that and may you experience it all many more times!
agensaequivocum 4y ago
Doing God's will.
- epsteinisntdead 4y ago
  Why can't God take care of that himself?
  - arbitrary_name 4y ago
    Because he's a weird insecure psychopathic man-child. Don't give him enough gratitude? Eternal suffering. Break one of the weird rules he apparently really cares about (but then allows his most trusted disciples to break)? Eternal suffering. Succumb to the biological drivers that are inherently within us? Yep, more eternal suffering. I would say you can't make this stuff up, but...

pmoleri 4y ago

The statements are true. Period. There's no need to imagine a place where all three overlap, they are already true. Specially since the last one is just a possibility.

birksherty 4y ago

It's too selfish for humans to say world is better. Is the world only for humans? Does it belong to us only? Every other species is in terrible condition than before or they got extinction. And the better is not going to last. All the progress is because of extreme fossil fuel usage. The effect has started to show, to be honest it's going to get much worse in coming decades. It's like a person falling from a building says life was never so exiting while going down each floor, even just before hitting the ground.

mandmandam 4y ago
Why are you booing him; he's right. While the article immediately addresses the acceptance of both awful and fantastic changes, it doesn't address our effect on the other species of the planet - which has been rather unambiguously horrific. On a scale that's basically impossible to comprehend without lifetimes of study across diverse fields. This needs to be addressed more. Every hour of every day, until we have accountability for the people responsible and genuine changes. I want our future to be one that respects the biosphere and all species, not just one. It's not just altruistic either - we've lost so much already, and people don't even know.
- slothtrop 4y ago
  > It's not just altruistic either Then it's factored in to the "is the world better for humans" category
  - Nevermark 4y ago
    Yes, "the world is better" should ideally include the impacts of today's decisions, not just today's direct response to previous factors. But the example of childhood death statistics doesn't include any analysis of how today's actions are setting up future childhood safety issues regarding plastics, climate change, overfishing, water shortages, etc.
perrygeo 4y ago
Exactly. The article claims that the world is "better" because we have improved child mortality rates. They state (correctly) that the improvement is a consequence of alleviating poverty and improving material living conditions. But how did we DO that? Did we just put our heads down and chant "economic growth for everyone"?! No. This growth was, and will continue to be, driven by industrial capital, mining, and fossil fuels. How are children born today going to raise grandchildren in the likely decline of those advantages? And there must be a discussion of the costs: pollution, climate change, resource depletion, species extinction, and myriad other social and environmental externalities. Are things really "better" if more kids are born... into an unsustainable system? I think the younger generation today is ALREADY seeing the cracks, getting less from the system while paying higher costs to buy in. The energy-blind adherence to growth at all costs is a philosophy that does a disservice not just other species on earth, but future humans as well.

fallingfrog 4y ago

I’ve often thought that if you drew a line with the witch burning dark ages at one end, and a society where everyone can achieve their true potential at the other end, we’re somewhere close to the halfway point now. Massive progress made, massive progress still to be made. So yeah I’d agree with all three statements.

TheCoelacanth 4y ago
To be pedantic, the peak time period for witch-burning was in the Early Modern period (15th-17th century), not the Dark Ages (5th-10th century)[1]. In the Dark Ages, church and civil authorities often took the position that witchcraft didn't exist, while later on they tended to give the idea more credence. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt

stuckinhell 4y ago

I have a hard time believing the fundamental problem is the world is "culture". After Covid-19 and a personal battle with Toxoplasmosis, I think people need a reminder of the unforgiving brutality of nature and evolution. The Toxoplasomsis parasite infects over 800,000 persons each year in the United States. We are finding out our models were wrong, and this parasite can cause cysts and behaviorial modification(probably via hormones) in human brains. No one talks about this, and I only found out because this parasite was giving me polycystic ovary syndrome! It's all an absolute nitemare, and a great awakening about how these parasites violate our bodies and minds. I think Evolution is the biggest enemy that we as humans must overcome with technology.

azekai 4y ago
>I think Evolution is the biggest enemy that we as humans must overcome with technology. I would ask for clarification on this point. Is it that blind, unguided evolution is our biggest enemy? Or how parasitic infections are so well-evolved to exploit our biological weaknesses? Evolution is adaptation to environment over time, the capacity for change. Claiming that evolution as an enemy seems about as useful as raging against the sun or oxygen.

jwarden 4y ago

This is the theme of Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now. It compiles a tremendous amount of data and research on progress in health, wealth. justice, equality, and happiness. It is a great antidote to the distorted pessimistic view of reality that comes from constant exposure to news, social commentary, and political activism, which focus relentlessly on the negative. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now

nickersonm 4y ago
I personally preferred The Better Angels of our Nature [0] as a deeper look focusing on the assorted statistics. Enlightenment Now recycles a lot of it and summarizes. There's some minor updates as well. [0] https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-nature https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-natu...
jfengel 4y ago
Thank you. It's very good to have the affirmation of a fellow straight, rich, white man that everything is hunky-dory. We can just take everybody a standard deviation or two off from the median, and just chop those tails off, neat as pie. Now everybody is doing great and we don't have to think about the negatives at all!

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

Warning: specious venn diagram.