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Thailand cave rescue: all 12 boys and coach successfully rescued

theguardian.com

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Re: Thailand cave rescue: all 12 boys and coach successfully rescued

#251

Post by stared »

macintux wrote: post #152
msvan wrote: post #50

It turns out that if your suffering is spectacular enough, people will come save you. Maybe if we throw all the poor children of the world into caves people will start caring about them.

12 kids and 1 adult trapped in a cave is a discrete, solvable problem. Millions of kids in poverty much less so. We're much better at dealing with time-bounded, localizable problems. Stalin's quote about tragedies and statistics comes to mind.

Still, the question is: for a given amount of resources (time, money, people) how many quality-life-years can be added?

If this quality is order of magnitude lower than other less exciting solutions (e.g. access to medicine and education for kids from poor families), then we should be aware that what we pay for is not lives saved, but an emotional entertainment show.

Re: Thailand cave rescue: all 12 boys and coach successfully rescued

#252

Post by amorphid »

macintux wrote: post #152
msvan wrote: post #50

It turns out that if your suffering is spectacular enough, people will come save you. Maybe if we throw all the poor children of the world into caves people will start caring about them.

12 kids and 1 adult trapped in a cave is a discrete, solvable problem. Millions of kids in poverty much less so. We're much better at dealing with time-bounded, localizable problems. Stalin's quote about tragedies and statistics comes to mind.

It's hard to imagine leaving them in there AND living with the knowledge that they had been left in there. Attempting a rescue seems like a pretty human thing to do, and I found it hard to blame people for being people. I certainly do awesome & dumb things because I'm a person.

Re: Thailand cave rescue: all 12 boys and coach successfully rescued

#253

Post by kev6168 »

RugnirViking wrote: post #215
kev6168 wrote: post #181

Man vs. nature, we are still bugs. What are your thoughts on how technology advancement in the next 30 years would change the way of this kind of rescue mission? Say in 2040, can a group of robots finish the mission in one day with ease? That will be awesome, people can be rescued from bad situations much sooner.

I cannot imagine how robots could be used for this kind of rescue in the near future. Each situation like this is too unique to allow for a generic 'life-saving robot'. Even if we were to really try to develop a state-of-the-art cave diving rescue robot, what would we use it for in this case? We still would have to have people working crisis psycology and sitting with the kids as they were extracted, and some way to…

I agree with you taking care of people psycologically is probably the weak point of a robot task force. But in terms of pure technology advancement, I 'll just throw some random possibilities here for discussion.

Remember even as of today AI can compete on a high level of huge video games, face recognition, natural language processing, playing Go/Chess game, etc. Imagine in 30 years, all the robots, armed with AI and made of materials a few times stronger than whatever we have today, should be able to scan, learn, adapt and go. Another minor point, the robots can probably carry some heavy machines (or laser guns) and just pound hard on the cave's narrow sections to make the passage wider. Etc.

Re: Thailand cave rescue: all 12 boys and coach successfully rescued

#254

Post by olivermarks »

golergka wrote: post #214
roystonvassey wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it even good for medical conditions, condensed history of major events, understanding geography and biography of actors, sportspersons and politicians. Actually, isn't it the * best * first website to learn about anything?

Please don't try to learn about controversial political topics there. The amount of editorial wars going on is stuggering - and the worst of it, you won't be able to tell when you're looking at a propaganda piece instead of an objective article because you need prior knowledge for that, and Wikipedia is exactly the place where people get their prior knowledge.

I trust Wikipedia for basic historical information, biographies etc. I feel sad that encylopedias and their peer reviews have been obliterated as a definitive source of knowledge and replaced by something which has a questionable editorial model. I use Wikipedia a lot but don't see it as a 'gold standard' of verified information. It seems a lot people do... https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-...

Re: Thailand cave rescue: all 12 boys and coach successfully rescued

#255

Post by abandonliberty »

bdz wrote: post #213

"If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost, just as many volunteers turn out. Poor arithmetic, but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature—a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price. Weakness? It might be the unique strength that w…

Yet who shows up for the 3.1 million children who die of malnutrition every year? Every 3 minutes we lose more children then were in the cave.

We can comprehend 13 people and the struggle against nature, while the scope of world hunger is far too complex and emotionally incomprehensible to mobilize enough people.

Re: Thailand cave rescue: all 12 boys and coach successfully rescued

#256

Post by mancerayder »

It's very odd that this somehow made it to all the media headlines. Sure, a happy ending and so forth, but in a world of ~7.5B, including indescribable tragedies on a daily basis, it makes you wonder how they knew the daily drama would lead to such ad dollars.

Re: Thailand cave rescue: all 12 boys and coach successfully rescued

#257

Post by joejerryronnie »

theossuary wrote: post #240
bdz wrote: post #213

"If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost, just as many volunteers turn out. Poor arithmetic, but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature—a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price. Weakness? It might be the unique strength that w…

What a great book, just finished listening to it. Afterwards I heard a lot of people thought it had a pro military/war bent; I don't think they read the book

Fantastic book. And I'm pretty sure it's a staunch anti-war critique.

Re: Thailand cave rescue: all 12 boys and coach successfully rescued

#258

Post by delroth »

docker_up wrote: post #227
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The coach. He shared what little rations they had, and his condition was visibly worse than the children by the time they were found. He also helped them by teaching them meditation, so as not to focus on their hunger.

Let's not forget that the coach was the one who led them into the caves in the first place.

Hindsight is 20/20. I guess nobody should ever do anything because it always has a tiny chance to go wrong?

The coach probably didn't even take a wrong decision based on the information available at the time (it isn't rain season yet).

Re: Thailand cave rescue: all 12 boys and coach successfully rescued

#259

Post by luckydata »

theossuary wrote: post #240
bdz wrote: post #213

"If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost, just as many volunteers turn out. Poor arithmetic, but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature—a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price. Weakness? It might be the unique strength that w…

What a great book, just finished listening to it. Afterwards I heard a lot of people thought it had a pro military/war bent; I don't think they read the book

I've read it multiple times (first when I was 16) and I still think it has a fundamental pro-military bent. Heinlein himself said so, I don't see any reason to doubt him.

Re: Thailand cave rescue: all 12 boys and coach successfully rescued

#260

Post by tomxor »

bdz wrote: post #213

"If a man gets lost in the mountains, hundreds will search and often two or three searchers are killed. But the next time somebody gets lost, just as many volunteers turn out. Poor arithmetic, but very human. It runs through all our folklore, all human religions, all our literature—a racial conviction that when one human needs rescue, others should not count the price. Weakness? It might be the unique strength that w…

Well, in this case one of the Thai divers died from running out of oxygen... but 12 - 1 is still a win if you want to reduce it to arithmetic.
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