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The death rate for children has dropped dramatically

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Re: The death rate for children has dropped dramatically

#41

Post by helloworld11 »

rocqua wrote: post #28
xvector wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Speaking from a European (dutch) perspective 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, o…

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.

Re: The death rate for children has dropped dramatically

#42

Post by raxxorraxor »

formerly_proven wrote: post #34
rocqua wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Look at basically any metric over the last 100 years and there will be an astonishing amount of improvement - 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 tha…

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.

Re: The death rate for children has dropped dramatically

#43

Post by TaylorPhebillo »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #25
TaylorPhebillo wrote: post #2

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. https://blog.givewell.org/2021/11/19/malnutrition-treatment/

I'd imagine that dealing with malnutrition in children maximises quality of life as well as the binary alive/dead distinction.

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.

Re: The death rate for children has dropped dramatically

#44

Post by JaimeThompson »

kortilla wrote: post #29
krageon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

>They will have better medical technology

In the US how will many be able to afford to access said technology given how expensive medical insurance is?

Re: The death rate for children has dropped dramatically

#45

Post by McLaren_Ferrari »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #42
formerly_proven wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at basically any metric over the last 100 years and there will be an astonishing amount of improvement - 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 tha…

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 c…

> Some people really need to take a chill pill.

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

Re: The death rate for children has dropped dramatically

#46

Post by rocqua »

formerly_proven wrote: post #34
rocqua wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Look at basically any metric over the last 100 years and there will be an astonishing amount of improvement - 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 tha…

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.

Re: The death rate for children has dropped dramatically

#47

Post by rocqua »

helloworld11 wrote: post #39
rocqua wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Speaking from a European (dutch) perspective

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.

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