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I wonder how many people are willing to take on the real adventure of living in any of the twenty poorest countries in the world, or twenty most tyrannical coun

I wonder how many people are willing to take on the real adventure of living in any of the twenty poorest countries in the world, or twenty most tyrannical countries of the world (there is overlap between the two sets) to try to change those from the inside. When I was in high school, going to a high school that was named after an astronaut just after the first moon landing, I thought it was completely natural to have the ambition to be the first man to set foot on Mars. I'm stunned that at this late date I could STILL be the first man to set foot on Mars. But as I grew into adult life, and visited more than one country here on Earth, I began to think that it is an even higher and more challenging ambition to go somewhere you are not constrained to go by desire for fame or for riches or for being the first in a new territory, but rather by a desire to solve intractable problems. Solving a problem of long standing is a bigger achievement than solving a problem that is unsolved mostly just because no one has found it worthwhile to solve it. Making any of the world's poorest countries richer in general, or making any of the world's most oppressed countries freer in general, is a problem for which some example solutions exist, just as traveling to other planets has some precedent in the manned moon missions and in robot space probes, but I suggest it is actually a much tougher and more interesting problem, a problem more worthy of a gnarly man willing to risk his life. I still admire astronauts, and I've exposed all four of my children to books and films about space exploration, but I'd be even more thrilled to see them or other young people I know take on the exploration challenge of bringing about improvement in the lives of their fellow human beings in the worst-off parts of planet Earth. There is a lot of challenging science involved in those problems, and the contributions to human knowledge that will come from solving those problems will provide lasting benefit to all of humankind, whatever planet our descendants live on. AFTER EDIT: Two comments below mention "paternalism." Nope. I am talking about "fraternalism," sharing in the life of the people where you live, understanding their problems deeply because they become your problems too, and then building solutions from the neighborhoods you live in. You can't jet-set that in, and you can't phone it in or international consultant it in, you can only live it in. I've asked before here on Hacker News how many of the participants here have ever even lived in (not just visited, but lived in) a third-world country. Not many have. (I have, and it was a dictatorship when I lived there, and as a foreign national I was part of the process of nudging it to become the democracy it is today.) To be a brother of your fellow human beings is a great adventure. It's harder than armchair criticism, but also more challenging and interesting.

nostromo 14y ago
Isn't this just western paternalism phrased to sound noble? Here we come, with our advanced ways, to fix problems you might not even consider problems.
- redwood 14y ago
  On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the inclination to scream 'paternalism' when folks from cosmopolitan cultures talk about problems in homogeneous ones that are struggling with problems caused by modernity, I think, is often naive Problems like the overpopulation that occurs when you introduce modern medicine and the green revolution but don't couple that with family planning cannot simply be fixed by organic cultural isolation. There's a sense that we talk abut rich v poor or western v exotic or etc but the better comparison is cosmopolitan-global vs homogeneous-traditional. The latter simply cannot compete against the problems of today.
- D_Alex 14y ago
  Paternalism: behavior, by a person, organization or state, which limits some person or group's liberty or autonomy for their own good. I do not see any evidence of this in the grandparent post. Edit: Also, I'd like to point out this, on the same front page of Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5390420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5390420
ewolf 14y ago
I fantasize about doing that sometimes, but usually, you can't get into politics without being a citizen — either due to legislation or because you won't be accepted as a representative by the population, for obvious reasons. But assuming you can get into politics, you'll still have to deal with an enormous struggle for power (be it elections you have to win or powerful people you have to convince) in order to get into a position to even make any change. Thus, this endeavour is practically impossible — it's already difficult enough to change something in your fatherland. AFTER tokenadult's EDIT: Your edit clarifies a lot. But fraternalism is still difficult to achieve: if you are from a different race than the native population, you'll have a hard time being accepted as their representative. An interesting example for this might be Singapore, where Lee Kuan Yew pushed the country from third to first world in 50 years. Although he is Singaporean, he brought in a lot of foreign knowledge as he had studied abroad. And the same issues with corruption/illegal methods some commenters mention here can be observed: in the early days of his career, he arrested his opponents, the communists, without any legal process to prevent them from jeopardizing his plans. Later, he made some radical decisions, that were not widely accepted by the population, bu that led to better results for the country (for example, he tore down old villages to replace them by high-rise buildings).

nostromo 14y ago

Isn't this just western paternalism phrased to sound noble? Here we come, with our advanced ways, to fix problems you might not even consider problems.

redwood 14y ago
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the inclination to scream 'paternalism' when folks from cosmopolitan cultures talk about problems in homogeneous ones that are struggling with problems caused by modernity, I think, is often naive Problems like the overpopulation that occurs when you introduce modern medicine and the green revolution but don't couple that with family planning cannot simply be fixed by organic cultural isolation. There's a sense that we talk abut rich v poor or western v exotic or etc but the better comparison is cosmopolitan-global vs homogeneous-traditional. The latter simply cannot compete against the problems of today.
D_Alex 14y ago
Paternalism: behavior, by a person, organization or state, which limits some person or group's liberty or autonomy for their own good. I do not see any evidence of this in the grandparent post. Edit: Also, I'd like to point out this, on the same front page of Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5390420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5390420

ewolf 14y ago

I fantasize about doing that sometimes, but usually, you can't get into politics without being a citizen — either due to legislation or because you won't be accepted as a representative by the population, for obvious reasons. But assuming you can get into politics, you'll still have to deal with an enormous struggle for power (be it elections you have to win or powerful people you have to convince) in order to get into a position to even make any change. Thus, this endeavour is practically impossible — it's already difficult enough to change something in your fatherland. AFTER tokenadult's EDIT: Your edit clarifies a lot. But fraternalism is still difficult to achieve: if you are from a different race than the native population, you'll have a hard time being accepted as their representative. An interesting example for this might be Singapore, where Lee Kuan Yew pushed the country from third to first world in 50 years. Although he is Singaporean, he brought in a lot of foreign knowledge as he had studied abroad. And the same issues with corruption/illegal methods some commenters mention here can be observed: in the early days of his career, he arrested his opponents, the communists, without any legal process to prevent them from jeopardizing his plans. Later, he made some radical decisions, that were not widely accepted by the population, bu that led to better results for the country (for example, he tore down old villages to replace them by high-rise buildings).