4 ms·
My favorite: Number of people die from cancer each year is same as number of people died in World War II each year. How much resources did we allocated to each?
by sytelus 4y ago
My favorite: Number of people die from cancer each year is same as number of people died in World War II each year. How much resources did we allocated to each? As former chimps, our ability grasp probability and statistics is astonishingly limited.
- noirbot 4y agoIsn't some of that skewed though? Most of the people who fought and died in WW2 were 18-40 year old folks in the prime of their life, or minorities killed in atrocities. My guess, and correct me if it's wrong, but a lot of people who die from cancer are generally unwell in other ways, or more elderly. It's also that there's not just one "cancer" we have to fix, and we already spend quite a lot of resources on studying and treating cancer.
- badpun 4y agoIt's not a fair comparison, because world population in 1940 was just 2.3 billion. So, in relative terms, WW2 killed almost four times as many people per year as cancer does. Not to mention that the goal of WW2 spending wasn't to improve some abstract death prevention statistics, it was actually to prevent madmen from taking over the whole world and turning it into totalitarian hell.