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Helping your neighbour is a colossal waste of time and money in most of the developed world. Accelerating the development of developing countries enables us to

Helping your neighbour is a colossal waste of time and money in most of the developed world. Accelerating the development of developing countries enables us to have more minds working on actually difficult tasks like curing cancer in all of its forms, managing and curing our planet, curing diseases that plague humanity, and finally advance our civilization. If all the help you can provide is isolated to your local neighborhood, you are stuck with well off neighborhoods improving logarithmically with time and money spent because they are well past the inflection point, and everyone else struggling to improve because they lack the resources, and likely facing the same issues the well off community faced and solved before, enabling even more waste of time (and therefore money). Local improvements do not propagate further if you are isolated, and thus you miss the big picture. This by the way is a well studied phenomenon and is the core difference between "conservatives" and "progressives", where the former considers their local community, but the latter considers systematic improvements. From my experience, the latter understands that the issues faced by other communities are issues they could have faced as well, and therefore see it as their responsibility to help them.

germandiago 4y ago
> Accelerating the development of developing countries enables us to have more minds working on actually difficult tasks like curing cancer in all of its forms, managing and curing our planet, curing diseases that plague humanity, and finally advance our civilization Helping the neighbour is a metaphor. It means helping to concrete people with concrete actions. It does not need to be your neighbor, you can go for missions in developing countries if you want (I live in a developing country right now). To give you an example, a group of friends here once helped a person we know with the money for heart surgery, something people here cannot pay. Instead of "oh, all we want free health care" and ask everyone else to pay the costs (to the rich!, to the blabla, etc.) and give the money to a bureaucrat so that they do with the money god knows what (you did not see the villas they own! Amazing!) what we did is to help a person we know we are really helping with their disease. Much more effective if you ask me. > Local improvements do not propagate further if you are isolated, and thus you miss the big picture. Development aids usually end up in the pocket of bureaucrats. It is better that you go do something for someone, even in a remote place and see what is going on than to just give to see what happens, which also, as I said, make people skip their worries: oh, we already give these people that, we are not bad. This is just a mechanism to feel better. It is just that it is not what happens. Bureaucrats can control the flow of money and we all know there is corruption and a lot of inefficiencies as well in how it is managed. What they cannot control is personal decisions where things do not go through them. So if we have good intentions, I think the best we can do is to do by ourselves or through the people we trust. > This by the way is a well studied phenomenon and is the core difference between "conservatives" and "progressives" No, this is a well-known thing in psychology where there have been experiments with groups of people where the more people you put, at the moment of simulating things like heart attacks, etc. to see how they reacted, when there is only one person there they try super fast to help, the more people you put the more "other will do it" happens. > where the former considers their local community, but the latter considers systematic improvements I still have to see what those systematic improvements collectivism has brought to the world in the broad sense. All of it starts in individual decisions and are usually better brought up when incentives fall on a few, not on too many. > From my experience, the latter understands that the issues faced by other communities are issues they could have faced as well, and therefore see it as their responsibility to help them This is not what happens in practice. If you are worried about others as in "progressive" as you define it, you still get your nice clothes, your Iphone and many other things as there are still people in trouble. If it is your brother or your mother or a very good friend there is a strong trend for you willing to sacrifice all those things if necessary. This is not bad or good, this is human nature, whether you like it or not. I am pretty convinced that among the people that want to "help others" in the general sense, talking about people with real ambitions to rule, not normal people with good intentions, we have the worst people. Because they put a custom on top of them for marketing, but their real intentions are not those. But even with good intentions, there is the problem of calculus from a centralized organization. So it is more inefficient than alternative mechanisms.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  None of that is true. Firstly it's clearly not true in a practical sense. Collective health care is far more efficient than private health care with donations, because collective health care can bypass executive greed and set sensible prices. Individual health care is at the mercy of markets run by amoral people, so you end up with 500,000 people being bankrupted every year, even though they have health insurance. Ask any diabetic in the US how well that's working for them. Secondly it's not true ethically. Some people will do anything for friends and family, others won't lift a finger. Should the friends and family of the latter not be helped? Thirdly the "more people -> less action" argument is clearly wrong on a collective scale, precisely because you employ individuals who are paid to provide professional help. So your heart attack patient isn't rescued by a caring amateur who may have no clue what to do, but by a professional paramedic and eventually a doctor who does. The doctor and paramedic are paid with taxes because all the evidence shows that is cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable universal option than privatised health care with copays and exclusions and all the other scams. Taxes are better than charity because in a collectively oriented system even with inefficiencies you don't get the patchy, random, whimsically motivated and unreliable care offered by charity and philanthropy. And it's not as if corporations aren't also bureaucracies - but without any possibility of democratic accountability.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    Profit margins of the healthcare industry as an aggregate are a single digit percentage. If you got rid of the "executive greed" (whatever that is) portion then you get a very small drop in prices, at best.
    - germandiago 4y ago
      Of course this is not true, there are other possible setups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devi_Shetty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devi_Shetty :) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-26/the-world-s-cheapest-hospital-has-to-get-even-cheaper https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-26/the-world... This just shows that it can be much cheaper than it is. The rate of success of those hospitals is not correlated to their price compared to their american counterparts. It is arranged in the most efficient way possible. This expands the reach of the people that can access health care in India. I do think it is a revolution. It is in the lines of (of course, with limitations) "what if health care could be as cheap as food?" Imagine the revolution. How come they built this? Yes, the profit motive is there. Without that incentive probably it would not be the same. Human incentive again. "Shetty aims to trim costs with such measures as buying cheaper scrubs and using cross ventilation instead of air conditioning.[17] That has cut the price of coronary bypass surgery to 95,000 rupees ($1,583), half of what it was 20 years ago.[3] In 2013 he aimed to get the price down to $800 within a decade. The same procedure costs $106,385 at Ohio's Cleveland Clinic" We can do better, right? No, it does not need to be public, just efficient.

germandiago 4y ago

> Accelerating the development of developing countries enables us to have more minds working on actually difficult tasks like curing cancer in all of its forms, managing and curing our planet, curing diseases that plague humanity, and finally advance our civilization Helping the neighbour is a metaphor. It means helping to concrete people with concrete actions. It does not need to be your neighbor, you can go for missions in developing countries if you want (I live in a developing country right now). To give you an example, a group of friends here once helped a person we know with the money for heart surgery, something people here cannot pay. Instead of "oh, all we want free health care" and ask everyone else to pay the costs (to the rich!, to the blabla, etc.) and give the money to a bureaucrat so that they do with the money god knows what (you did not see the villas they own! Amazing!) what we did is to help a person we know we are really helping with their disease. Much more effective if you ask me. > Local improvements do not propagate further if you are isolated, and thus you miss the big picture. Development aids usually end up in the pocket of bureaucrats. It is better that you go do something for someone, even in a remote place and see what is going on than to just give to see what happens, which also, as I said, make people skip their worries: oh, we already give these people that, we are not bad. This is just a mechanism to feel better. It is just that it is not what happens. Bureaucrats can control the flow of money and we all know there is corruption and a lot of inefficiencies as well in how it is managed. What they cannot control is personal decisions where things do not go through them. So if we have good intentions, I think the best we can do is to do by ourselves or through the people we trust. > This by the way is a well studied phenomenon and is the core difference between "conservatives" and "progressives" No, this is a well-known thing in psychology where there have been experiments with groups of people where the more people you put, at the moment of simulating things like heart attacks, etc. to see how they reacted, when there is only one person there they try super fast to help, the more people you put the more "other will do it" happens. > where the former considers their local community, but the latter considers systematic improvements I still have to see what those systematic improvements collectivism has brought to the world in the broad sense. All of it starts in individual decisions and are usually better brought up when incentives fall on a few, not on too many. > From my experience, the latter understands that the issues faced by other communities are issues they could have faced as well, and therefore see it as their responsibility to help them This is not what happens in practice. If you are worried about others as in "progressive" as you define it, you still get your nice clothes, your Iphone and many other things as there are still people in trouble. If it is your brother or your mother or a very good friend there is a strong trend for you willing to sacrifice all those things if necessary. This is not bad or good, this is human nature, whether you like it or not. I am pretty convinced that among the people that want to "help others" in the general sense, talking about people with real ambitions to rule, not normal people with good intentions, we have the worst people. Because they put a custom on top of them for marketing, but their real intentions are not those. But even with good intentions, there is the problem of calculus from a centralized organization. So it is more inefficient than alternative mechanisms.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
None of that is true. Firstly it's clearly not true in a practical sense. Collective health care is far more efficient than private health care with donations, because collective health care can bypass executive greed and set sensible prices. Individual health care is at the mercy of markets run by amoral people, so you end up with 500,000 people being bankrupted every year, even though they have health insurance. Ask any diabetic in the US how well that's working for them. Secondly it's not true ethically. Some people will do anything for friends and family, others won't lift a finger. Should the friends and family of the latter not be helped? Thirdly the "more people -> less action" argument is clearly wrong on a collective scale, precisely because you employ individuals who are paid to provide professional help. So your heart attack patient isn't rescued by a caring amateur who may have no clue what to do, but by a professional paramedic and eventually a doctor who does. The doctor and paramedic are paid with taxes because all the evidence shows that is cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable universal option than privatised health care with copays and exclusions and all the other scams. Taxes are better than charity because in a collectively oriented system even with inefficiencies you don't get the patchy, random, whimsically motivated and unreliable care offered by charity and philanthropy. And it's not as if corporations aren't also bureaucracies - but without any possibility of democratic accountability.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  Profit margins of the healthcare industry as an aggregate are a single digit percentage. If you got rid of the "executive greed" (whatever that is) portion then you get a very small drop in prices, at best.
  - germandiago 4y ago
    Of course this is not true, there are other possible setups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devi_Shetty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devi_Shetty :) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-26/the-world-s-cheapest-hospital-has-to-get-even-cheaper https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-26/the-world... This just shows that it can be much cheaper than it is. The rate of success of those hospitals is not correlated to their price compared to their american counterparts. It is arranged in the most efficient way possible. This expands the reach of the people that can access health care in India. I do think it is a revolution. It is in the lines of (of course, with limitations) "what if health care could be as cheap as food?" Imagine the revolution. How come they built this? Yes, the profit motive is there. Without that incentive probably it would not be the same. Human incentive again. "Shetty aims to trim costs with such measures as buying cheaper scrubs and using cross ventilation instead of air conditioning.[17] That has cut the price of coronary bypass surgery to 95,000 rupees ($1,583), half of what it was 20 years ago.[3] In 2013 he aimed to get the price down to $800 within a decade. The same procedure costs $106,385 at Ohio's Cleveland Clinic" We can do better, right? No, it does not need to be public, just efficient.