The enormous risk factor from the article is malnutrition. Givewell, an organization which specializes in estimating the cost-effectiveness of forms of charitable giving, suggests treating acute malnutrition could be extremely cost effective, costing a few thousand dollars to save a life.
I hope so? But that's hard to study, and Givewell (in contrast to other effective altruism organizations) is fairly conservative about making claims and recommendations.
Claiming everything is cause for alarm is defecting against the ability to communicate about important things because it means alarms no longer work. Journalists have been crying wolf 24/7/365 on every available bit of bandwidth for decades now and it's time to start treating them appropriately.
The NYT is constantly using the words "scary", "terrifying", "afraid", "catastrophe". The sun is still shining and my kids are still playing outside. You can ignore the news for years and live care-free without psychological consequences.
Don't forget "historic". It seems every day there are approximately 713 new historic events happening, that are totally and completely unlike any other event, evar!
I do believe that generally the world is not okay. We are currently suffering the consequences of many slowly unfolding tragedies that were well warned about by experts. So I imagine there are quite a few tragedies building up now, warned about, but not yet acted uppon.
Honestly - don’t care. The internet makes me able to see endless tragedies big and small 24/7. I help my family, friends, and community and pay it forwards. I sleep like a baby.
I am not talking about tragedies like the war in Ukraine. I'm talking about tragedies like leaded gasoline, PFAS, global warming, air pollution in cities. Things that affect everyone, but slowly enough that we barely notice.
Meh. These "tragedies" are often irrelevant and often the only time you will ever encounter them will be in some news article written by a hand-wringing doomer.
Willfully ignoring the news is amazing for mental health. The benefit of cutting the constant stream of doomerism out of one's life cannot be overstated - it's a benefit that far exceeds whatever minimal value to society you could provide by tuning into the news.
Climate change, PFAS, over-reliance on Russian gas, leaded gasoline, inhumane bureaucracy, discontent with immigrants, lack of technical manual labour, government culture becoming hostile to transparency, nitrogen emmesions exceeding European law.
That is a small list of things that were known to be bad, and warned about for a very long time, but were adressed very late, or not yet.
These are all things that affect me directly. They just act slowly.
How many of the things we are being warned about now will be on a similar list in 20 years?
Also speaking from a European perspective. Virtually all of those problems you mention do exist to some extent, but have existed in many worse forms before. Life in Europe is today objectively, by almost all objective measures, better than at any time in its very long history and it continues to improve in most ways (even with events like the Ukraine invasion). In case you do have children, barring a truly black swan type catastrophe, the overwhelming likelihood is that their contexts when they're adults, in Europe or otherwise, will be still better than those of us today.
It's not to say that catastrophes don't happen (both of the World Wars were very real and serious tragedies, as were our last two pandemics), but they're nowhere near as likely as people claim in advance and many other things can continue to improve even when they do unfold. Life can go on and keep improving and it's not necessary, for the sake of a reasoned, mature life, to fixate on the very old human urge to predict apocalypse at any turn.
What can you personally do about it? Like it or not we are on a ship we can't steer. Might as well look inwardly and enjoy yourself, friends, and family most of all.
You can help out with volunteer work or donations, you can vote instead of in your own interests but tactically to help others, you can undermine oppressive laws with secret acts of kindness. It's amazing what one person can do.
None of those things will solve the real problem: We're destroying our own biosphere. Our kids are going to live in an objectively shittier world, to say nothing of their children. That's not solvable with random acts of kindness, because cruelty isn't what's killing the planet. It's indifference.
It's not solvable by voting, because the generation you can vote into political power will never suffer the consequences of their own decisions. The timelines are too long. Couple that with the fact that political power is very temporal and political thinking is of necessity fairly short-term and you have to come to the conclusion that no politician will solve this for anyone.
If you have a meaningful way to solve this issue, I'd love to hear it. But pretending there are things we can do to solve it is not going to change anything.
Your suggestion amounts to "do nothing" which will achieve even less then voting. Practically speaking, people who do think there is issue and are willing to look for solutions or at least talk about the issue have a chance to improve state of things in the long term.
People who gave up, wont ever improve anything. People who insist that nothing should be done, because none if it is perfect enough are actively working against solution.
What I said was that the provided solutions are both beaten to death and meaningless, and that I would like a solution that did have the potential for impact. What I did not say is to do nothing, so you are not responding to me but rather a fictional person that does not exist. I think we call that a strawman.
> Our kids are going to live in an objectively shittier world, to say nothing of their children.
This is complete horseshit. They will have better medical technology, better housing technology, better food technology (people ate like shit 50 years ago let alone 100 years ago), etc.
It’s only “objectively shittier” if your objective has nothing to do with human life and is mainly focused on biodiversity.
Almost everywhere throughout the developed world the ratio "house prices"/"wages" is skyrocketing. Young people are increasingly forming a precariat with fewer and fewer of them being able to own a home and constitute a family. "Better housing technology" what does this even mean? Solar panels on the roof? Well first you need to own a roof to put panels in.
>better food technology
Obesity is increasing. In most places junk food is cheaper per calorie than healthy food (to say nothing of aggressive marketing of the former). Again, what does this "better food technology" refer to?
It's very clear that the quality of life for the average human is better than it has been at any other time in history, and that we've been on the upward trend for a long, long time.
The mistake is looking at that historical trend and falling for a whig history belief that this trend is the unstoppable march of history and things will always get better, when it's very possible that we are the generation that is approaching the peak.
These gains have to be fought for and protected. The principle issue is that this past century's gains have been built on borrowed time - namely on limited resources that sow the seeds of global environmental catastrophe with every extracted Joule that allows for the next temporary marginal gain in quality of life.
Things are better now than they've ever been. But if someone sticks their head in the ground and ignores the problems that are already starting to manifest they might be in for a rude awakening.
If people think that it wouldn't matter too much. But we have a very active older generation that constantly release new laws against terrorism and violence until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because some people have had enough.
We have been fighting terrorism for 20 years, it did cost trillions of dollars and you cannot even take a coke on a plane. Completely off base an insane because essentially you are correct. We live in the safest times ever. Sure, there are local conflicts and enough human suffering, but policies for safety are still in extremely high demand.
Some people really need to take a chill pill.
A caveat is that wealth is relative and the younger generation will have a harder time finding dependable long time employment and may not be able to afford a home because speculations drove prices beyond reason. But they don't really need their nuts checked while boarding a plane.
People can't take a chill pill because as we look around all the low hanging fruits of technological progress which bring about quality of life have been exploited.
We are in the refinement and small improvement part of the S-curve. Saturation.
Fracking wasn't as big as striking oil for the first time. EVs won't be like re-discovering the car all over again.
Conflicts and fear arise from scarcity or perceived scarcity. They will only go up as perception of scarcity rises among the population. When I say scarcity I also mean diminished rate of improvement, not just plain scarcity of oil, food , land etc.
Looking back at the late 1990s there were some quarters when the US economy grew at 7% YoY. Of course peple were chill back then, with that rate of improvement in quality of life everybody would be.
It's confirmed by the fact that the chillest and most loose countries today are Nigeria, Ethiopia, the usual suspects which grow at 9% YoY
There has been tremendous progress. We are better of now that 50 years ago without any doubt.
Some of that progress has come with some collateral damage though. And these come with some slow but steady harms. It is definitely worth it to try and contain this collateral damage. Lest in another 50 years we are actually worse of than we are now.
The experts are living in first world countries and their expectations are pegged to continual improvement in quality of life.
When my dad was growing up in Bangladesh, one out of four kids died before age 5. He nonetheless remembers a happy childhood in his village. Today the childhood mortality rate is under 1 in 30 (about where the US was when he was growing up, but three times higher than the US is today).
Experts say climate change will cost Bangladesh double digit fractions of its GDP by the end of the century (which will still be much higher than today). Are we going to go back to a quarter of kids dying before five? Do the folks in the US not having kids because they worry about climate change think the US is going to get anywhere near what was common around the world a generation ago?
Please do name these tragedies and their unfolding consequences, somehow majorly different from the other, previous unfolding tragedies that have been predicted for many, many decades by all sorts of people.
Climate change, PFAS, over-reliance on Russian gas, leaded gasoline, inhumane bureaucracy, discontent with immigrants, lack of technical manual labour, government culture becoming hostile to transparency, nitrogen emmesions exceeding European law.
> You can ignore the news for years and live care-free without psychological consequences.
Yeah, the problem is that your children's children will be living with the consequences of 3 °C global warming or worse, while both of us will probably be dead for long at that time. Humans psychologically aren't wired to deal with long-term threats, our brains can't process them and their impact nowhere near as well as short-term threats.
Just look at the Ukraine crisis: People raised the bells already in 2014, and no one listened to them. Only when tanks rolled up on Kyiv, the West finally got its collective arse up and started actually delivering serious ammo towards the Ukrainians.
This is not a problem with journalists alone. This is human nature. Establish the same set of incentives and structures and this outcome will be very likely.
Yeah, NPR has been driving me nuts with this crap. There seem to be 0 news sources available that can’t help but slip some alarmist flavor text in. I can’t listen to it anymore.
Which would you click? There's this weird phenomena in society where we always attribute different actions than those we'd take to the rest of society, and I think it drives a lot of this stupidity.
There was certainly a time that yellow journalism drove interest, but that's because it was more the exception than the rule, which enabled it to exploit naivete more effectively. Now that everything is a historic alarming unprecedented catastrophic dangerous event (or in the equal but opposite direction an amazing groundbreaking miracle cure for cancer), I mostly just yawn and look for the next link. And I've no reason to believe that my tolerance for hyperbole (to describe what's happening kindly) is substantially less than the rest of society.
As some sort of quantitative evidence for my argument, I'd also point to the trust in media polling [1]. There is only 1 "media" outlet that more than 50% of Americans rate as at least "somewhat trustworthy" - The Weather Channel. That absolutely all trust has collapsed leads me to believe most people know all of this stuff is, at best, yellow journalism.
I always click the headlines with the best puns. And as a meteorologist, I’m encouraged by the trust in the Weather Channel. When I was a kid everyone would say how bad forecasts were, but we’ve really gotten better at the 5-10 day forecasts in the last couple decades. I’m glad to see the public has noticed!
> We risk disrupting what has consistently been a downard trend by acting on some arbitrary definition of "cause of alarm".
> Teenage pregnancy after the 1960's is one example of that
Could you elaborate on that? What happened to teenage pregnancy after the 1960s (I sounds like the numbers are going up/not going down anymore?), and what did disrupt that trend?
Even having a mildly sick child is devastating as a parent. It guts you. I can’t fathom what it would be like to lose a child. I’m sure it is a major factor in many other poor outcomes for the family and community.
46 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 92.8 ms ] threadhttps://blog.givewell.org/2021/11/19/malnutrition-treatment/
( /s )
I find these claims actually dangerous
We risk disrupting what has consistently been a downard trend by acting on some arbitrary definition of "cause of alarm".
Teenage pregnancy after the 1960's is one example of that
Ive lost faith in people’s ability to perceive that so might as well make them your flock
Willfully ignoring the news is amazing for mental health. The benefit of cutting the constant stream of doomerism out of one's life cannot be overstated - it's a benefit that far exceeds whatever minimal value to society you could provide by tuning into the news.
Climate change, PFAS, over-reliance on Russian gas, leaded gasoline, inhumane bureaucracy, discontent with immigrants, lack of technical manual labour, government culture becoming hostile to transparency, nitrogen emmesions exceeding European law.
That is a small list of things that were known to be bad, and warned about for a very long time, but were adressed very late, or not yet. These are all things that affect me directly. They just act slowly.
How many of the things we are being warned about now will be on a similar list in 20 years?
It's not to say that catastrophes don't happen (both of the World Wars were very real and serious tragedies, as were our last two pandemics), but they're nowhere near as likely as people claim in advance and many other things can continue to improve even when they do unfold. Life can go on and keep improving and it's not necessary, for the sake of a reasoned, mature life, to fixate on the very old human urge to predict apocalypse at any turn.
It's not solvable by voting, because the generation you can vote into political power will never suffer the consequences of their own decisions. The timelines are too long. Couple that with the fact that political power is very temporal and political thinking is of necessity fairly short-term and you have to come to the conclusion that no politician will solve this for anyone.
If you have a meaningful way to solve this issue, I'd love to hear it. But pretending there are things we can do to solve it is not going to change anything.
The general form of the issue (and therefore solutions) is outlined by Olsen's Collective Action Theory.
We're doing this to ourselves, like the prisoner's dilemma and game theory tells us we can rewrite the rules of the game to get better outcomes.
People who gave up, wont ever improve anything. People who insist that nothing should be done, because none if it is perfect enough are actively working against solution.
This is complete horseshit. They will have better medical technology, better housing technology, better food technology (people ate like shit 50 years ago let alone 100 years ago), etc.
It’s only “objectively shittier” if your objective has nothing to do with human life and is mainly focused on biodiversity.
Almost everywhere throughout the developed world the ratio "house prices"/"wages" is skyrocketing. Young people are increasingly forming a precariat with fewer and fewer of them being able to own a home and constitute a family. "Better housing technology" what does this even mean? Solar panels on the roof? Well first you need to own a roof to put panels in.
>better food technology
Obesity is increasing. In most places junk food is cheaper per calorie than healthy food (to say nothing of aggressive marketing of the former). Again, what does this "better food technology" refer to?
In the US how will many be able to afford to access said technology given how expensive medical insurance is?
- Extreme poverty
- Literacy
- Life expectancy
- Access to medicine
- #People living in democracies
- Access to clean water
- Access to food
- General standard of living
- Air quality
- ...
Meanwhile some people think (and others trying to make it look like) we're living in desperate times and are worse off than 50 years ago.
The mistake is looking at that historical trend and falling for a whig history belief that this trend is the unstoppable march of history and things will always get better, when it's very possible that we are the generation that is approaching the peak.
These gains have to be fought for and protected. The principle issue is that this past century's gains have been built on borrowed time - namely on limited resources that sow the seeds of global environmental catastrophe with every extracted Joule that allows for the next temporary marginal gain in quality of life.
Things are better now than they've ever been. But if someone sticks their head in the ground and ignores the problems that are already starting to manifest they might be in for a rude awakening.
We have been fighting terrorism for 20 years, it did cost trillions of dollars and you cannot even take a coke on a plane. Completely off base an insane because essentially you are correct. We live in the safest times ever. Sure, there are local conflicts and enough human suffering, but policies for safety are still in extremely high demand.
Some people really need to take a chill pill.
A caveat is that wealth is relative and the younger generation will have a harder time finding dependable long time employment and may not be able to afford a home because speculations drove prices beyond reason. But they don't really need their nuts checked while boarding a plane.
People can't take a chill pill because as we look around all the low hanging fruits of technological progress which bring about quality of life have been exploited.
We are in the refinement and small improvement part of the S-curve. Saturation.
Fracking wasn't as big as striking oil for the first time. EVs won't be like re-discovering the car all over again.
Conflicts and fear arise from scarcity or perceived scarcity. They will only go up as perception of scarcity rises among the population. When I say scarcity I also mean diminished rate of improvement, not just plain scarcity of oil, food , land etc.
Looking back at the late 1990s there were some quarters when the US economy grew at 7% YoY. Of course peple were chill back then, with that rate of improvement in quality of life everybody would be.
It's confirmed by the fact that the chillest and most loose countries today are Nigeria, Ethiopia, the usual suspects which grow at 9% YoY
Some of that progress has come with some collateral damage though. And these come with some slow but steady harms. It is definitely worth it to try and contain this collateral damage. Lest in another 50 years we are actually worse of than we are now.
When my dad was growing up in Bangladesh, one out of four kids died before age 5. He nonetheless remembers a happy childhood in his village. Today the childhood mortality rate is under 1 in 30 (about where the US was when he was growing up, but three times higher than the US is today).
Experts say climate change will cost Bangladesh double digit fractions of its GDP by the end of the century (which will still be much higher than today). Are we going to go back to a quarter of kids dying before five? Do the folks in the US not having kids because they worry about climate change think the US is going to get anywhere near what was common around the world a generation ago?
Climate change, PFAS, over-reliance on Russian gas, leaded gasoline, inhumane bureaucracy, discontent with immigrants, lack of technical manual labour, government culture becoming hostile to transparency, nitrogen emmesions exceeding European law.
Yeah, the problem is that your children's children will be living with the consequences of 3 °C global warming or worse, while both of us will probably be dead for long at that time. Humans psychologically aren't wired to deal with long-term threats, our brains can't process them and their impact nowhere near as well as short-term threats.
Just look at the Ukraine crisis: People raised the bells already in 2014, and no one listened to them. Only when tanks rolled up on Kyiv, the West finally got its collective arse up and started actually delivering serious ammo towards the Ukrainians.
It’s quite sad when you think about it, because those who have a desire to learn more are then taken advantage of until they cower in fear.
Which would you click first? “Clock sales dip, wristwatches gain” or “Breaking News: storm watches PUMMEL bedside clock sales, is it cause for alarm?”
There was certainly a time that yellow journalism drove interest, but that's because it was more the exception than the rule, which enabled it to exploit naivete more effectively. Now that everything is a historic alarming unprecedented catastrophic dangerous event (or in the equal but opposite direction an amazing groundbreaking miracle cure for cancer), I mostly just yawn and look for the next link. And I've no reason to believe that my tolerance for hyperbole (to describe what's happening kindly) is substantially less than the rest of society.
As some sort of quantitative evidence for my argument, I'd also point to the trust in media polling [1]. There is only 1 "media" outlet that more than 50% of Americans rate as at least "somewhat trustworthy" - The Weather Channel. That absolutely all trust has collapsed leads me to believe most people know all of this stuff is, at best, yellow journalism.
[1] - https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
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> Teenage pregnancy after the 1960's is one example of that
Could you elaborate on that? What happened to teenage pregnancy after the 1960s (I sounds like the numbers are going up/not going down anymore?), and what did disrupt that trend?