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What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

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Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#31
How many deaths from diarrheal diseases or pneumonia could be prevented with, say $4 Billion dollars?

Well, the people of Palo Alto, after a few tragic suicides-by-train, want the people of California to pay tens of billions of dollars to put Caltrain underground through their town. (The number of deaths of children in Palo Alto from the train pales in comparison to the number of deaths to children from gunshot wounds on the other side of 101 and across the bay....)

https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2019/04/25/popular-but-e...

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#32

How many deaths from diarrheal diseases or pneumonia could be prevented with, say $4 Billion dollars? Well, the people of Palo Alto, after a few tragic suicides-by-train, want the people of California to pay tens of billions of dollars to put Caltrain underground through their town. (The number of deaths of children in Palo Alto from the train pales in comparison to the number of deaths to children from gunshot wound…

1) https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...

2) the diarrheal diseases generally don't need much money at all. 16oz water, fist of salt, three finger pinch of sugar. Unfortunately, the adults in charge of those children tend to remain ignorant even after the Western doctors tell them about the cure. So money won't do anything for that. You can't force a Madagascan to stop dancing with family corpses, ya know.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#33

How many deaths from diarrheal diseases or pneumonia could be prevented with, say $4 Billion dollars? Well, the people of Palo Alto, after a few tragic suicides-by-train, want the people of California to pay tens of billions of dollars to put Caltrain underground through their town. (The number of deaths of children in Palo Alto from the train pales in comparison to the number of deaths to children from gunshot wound…

1) https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-... 2) the diarrheal diseases generally don't need much money at all. 16oz water, fist of salt, three finger pinch of sugar. Unfortunately, the adults in charge of those children tend to remain ignorant even after the Western doctors tell them about the cure. So money won't do anything for that. You can't force a Madagascan to stop dancing with family cor…

>So money won't do anything for that.

You can't force a Madagascan to stop dancing with corpses, but you can persuade them that it's uncouth and old-fashioned using perfectly ordinary marketing techniques. The norms of a society can be changed with remarkable speed if you write a big cheque to people who change social norms for a living.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#34
post #30
post #21

I have a pet theory that saving children from natural deaths is harmful to future generations. Surely by intervening so much, we're giving unhealthy people as much evolutionary advantage as healthy people. If the whole world reaches western standards of infant mortality and stays there long enough, will children eventually become dependent on even more interventions and be even more vulnerable to death without them?…

> I may pass that on to my own children A more palatable approach would be to treat you but not allow you to have children with the same condition. In the past this has been done in fairly barbaric ways but embryo selection offers a far more reasonable solution with minimal limitations on individual rights. As for whether we should treat children and condemn them to a life of suffering, we already do this calculus wi…

That's a slippery slope. Who gets to decide who lives and who dies? Who should we abort or sterilize? We all suffer to some degree, then we all die. It's the human condition.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#35

How many deaths from diarrheal diseases or pneumonia could be prevented with, say $4 Billion dollars? Well, the people of Palo Alto, after a few tragic suicides-by-train, want the people of California to pay tens of billions of dollars to put Caltrain underground through their town. (The number of deaths of children in Palo Alto from the train pales in comparison to the number of deaths to children from gunshot wound…

- Palo Alto homeowners mistakenly believed for years that the new HSR would be buried so that the noise wouldn't affect their property values. It's a kind of mass delusion thing, since you're looking at $2 billion/mile or so

- Mountain View, an adjacent city, just went througn the same calculus wrt tunneling and found it just as breathtakingly unaffordable

- Atherton was mentioned in the article or comments, which is hilarious. They have a city lawyer who's mandate is to not change a single thing.

- When I say "city", I mean approx. population 40,000. So they don't have billions to throw around, although the York family did help Santa Clara City (pop. 10,000) spend $1.2 billion for their football stadium. :)

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-... 2) the diarrheal diseases generally don't need much money at all. 16oz water, fist of salt, three finger pinch of sugar. Unfortunately, the adults in charge of those children tend to remain ignorant even after the Western doctors tell them about the cure. So money won't do anything for that. You can't force a Madagascan to stop dancing with family cor…

>So money won't do anything for that. You can't force a Madagascan to stop dancing with corpses, but you can persuade them that it's uncouth and old-fashioned using perfectly ordinary marketing techniques. The norms of a society can be changed with remarkable speed if you write a big cheque to people who change social norms for a living.

Does this actually work cross-culturally?

My understanding of advertising is that it relies very heavily on building associations between the product being advertised and existing positive social norms. The reason truck commercials in the U.S. always feature scruffy broad-chested men driving shiny vehicles across wide-open rugged terrain is because in the U.S. we have this cultural mythology about the frontier and conquering nature and we associate manliness with this (and with facial hair, muscles, etc.). And this works because there's already a shared cultural norm that's been built up over centuries, which most of the people who develop advertisements are familiar with and can mine for ideas. When I visit my in-laws in Taiwan, the advertisements look very different (although somehow the skinny-but-buxom-blonde has made its way over there too, despite representing basically 0% of the female population).

In a past life, my primary job was getting people to click on search results faster, and my secondary job was making sure Google stayed in the press for positive reasons. A lot of this was data-driven, but when it came to adapting changes to individual countries, we'd always defer to the local teams. Google.kr looks different from Google.ru, both of which look different from Google.com, and in many cases these differences were simply because a competitor had gotten to the local country first and that's what the population had become accustomed to.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#37
post #23
post #21

I have a pet theory that saving children from natural deaths is harmful to future generations. Surely by intervening so much, we're giving unhealthy people as much evolutionary advantage as healthy people. If the whole world reaches western standards of infant mortality and stays there long enough, will children eventually become dependent on even more interventions and be even more vulnerable to death without them?…

Well not just children. E.g. the proportion of women needing c-sections is increasing. I don't think dependence on technology would improve human life in the long run, since the genetic maladaptation load would eventually overwhelm the ability of technology to keep up and we'd be back to where we started. But the key is that we're getting the ability to engage in genetic engineering, so realistically we should be app…

Isn't C-section for some people like a luxury to keep the body nice or something like that? Genuine question because I heard (yes, hearsay) that C-sections are for people in the USA like fashion? The again, I can't imagine any doctor, in my country at least, doing a C-section unless it is absolutely necessary.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#38
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I may pass that on to my own children A more palatable approach would be to treat you but not allow you to have children with the same condition. In the past this has been done in fairly barbaric ways but embryo selection offers a far more reasonable solution with minimal limitations on individual rights. As for whether we should treat children and condemn them to a life of suffering, we already do this calculus wi…

That's a slippery slope. Who gets to decide who lives and who dies? Who should we abort or sterilize? We all suffer to some degree, then we all die. It's the human condition.

At one point you could ask what the difference is between not treating a condition and euthanasia.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#39

How many deaths from diarrheal diseases or pneumonia could be prevented with, say $4 Billion dollars? Well, the people of Palo Alto, after a few tragic suicides-by-train, want the people of California to pay tens of billions of dollars to put Caltrain underground through their town. (The number of deaths of children in Palo Alto from the train pales in comparison to the number of deaths to children from gunshot wound…

- Palo Alto homeowners mistakenly believed for years that the new HSR would be buried so that the noise wouldn't affect their property values. It's a kind of mass delusion thing, since you're looking at $2 billion/mile or so - Mountain View, an adjacent city, just went througn the same calculus wrt tunneling and found it just as breathtakingly unaffordable - Atherton was mentioned in the article or comments, which is…

Nit: Santa Clara City has a population of 116,000.

Re: What are children dying from and what can we do about it?

#40
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I may pass that on to my own children A more palatable approach would be to treat you but not allow you to have children with the same condition. In the past this has been done in fairly barbaric ways but embryo selection offers a far more reasonable solution with minimal limitations on individual rights. As for whether we should treat children and condemn them to a life of suffering, we already do this calculus wi…

That's a slippery slope. Who gets to decide who lives and who dies? Who should we abort or sterilize? We all suffer to some degree, then we all die. It's the human condition.

Ultimately the parents should get to decide, but we should make all means necessary available to them to give them the option so select, or engineer, a healthy embryo.
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