I agree, and feel the same way, though I suppose I’m not as generally nice as you. Just recently, I was talking with some friends about the earthquake in Haiti. I said that the Haitian relief effort was inappropriate to the scale of the tragedy considering existential risk, deaths by aging, even overshadowed by mundane things like starvation in Africa, etc. I said, wouldn’t it be so much better if people could look at the Haitian earthquake and say to themselves, “Suffering is horrible! Where can I, personally, correct the most suffering?”
The phrase I’ve created to cope with the situation is, “The only way out is through.” That is to say, people will die regardless of how much I work to save them. So, find what has the highest chance of saving the most people over the longest time, invest there, and trust in forward progress to create technologies and energy sources that can alleviate all this suffering before it’s too late.
I agree, and feel the same way, though I suppose I’m not as generally nice as you. Just recently, I was talking with some friends about the earthquake in Haiti. I said that the Haitian relief effort was inappropriate to the scale of the tragedy considering existential risk, deaths by aging, even overshadowed by mundane things like starvation in Africa, etc. I said, wouldn’t it be so much better if people could look at the Haitian earthquake and say to themselves, “Suffering is horrible! Where can I, personally, correct the most suffering?”
The phrase I’ve created to cope with the situation is, “The only way out is through.” That is to say, people will die regardless of how much I work to save them. So, find what has the highest chance of saving the most people over the longest time, invest there, and trust in forward progress to create technologies and energy sources that can alleviate all this suffering before it’s too late.