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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   4079 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 7, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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You can want it for them all you want, but if you keep bailing people out, they'll come to expect it, and start acting accordingly. If you can show me how you successfully pulled a community into self-sufficiency, then you can start telling me how these forces pull in the same direction, at the moment it just flies in the face of observable reality.

The outcome isn't relevant to this question. If you want what's best for someone, you want them to have both temporal prosperity and self-sufficiency. That's all.

On a personal level I can point to plenty of people who benefitted from this approach. This is pretty much all children. On a community level I'd point to South Korea, which has become quite successful in part due to large amounts of aid from the US.

There's something to be said for autonomy, even if it leads to bad outcomes, both at the personal and national level, but generally I'm not against what you're putting forward, the issue is that in current circumstances, it's not politically feasible.

I just don't get why you feel the need to say this to me. My whole point is that our efforts should be devoted towards making it politically feasible.

From what I understand we actually put quite a lot of effort into a lot of these poor countries.

Yes, somewhat, but it's not the right kind of effort. We provide them with resources and education without doing much to change the culture or their incentives.

Hold on there, I reserve the term "deserve to die" for people who I'd personally pull the trigger on. People who will stay stuck in a defect-defect loop to the point of starvation do not meet these criteria, but they are also not my responsibility.

Oh-oh. When you proposed a touch of authoritarianism above to solve the problem, I was not against it, but it's quickly starting to look like your "charity" is an excuse for global totalitarian control.

Children exist. $5,000 per life won't save many children but it will save some. Children bear no blame at all for the culture raising them. Your suggestion is that African culture is so bad that we should leave them to their own devices (to "starve" i.e. die to diseases we can easily prevent), which necessarily means also leaving children to starve. I strongly disagree, but I argue that if that is in fact your belief, you should be even more extreme than I am, and eradicate the entire culture utterly in order to save children from being corrupted into such worthless mongrels.

The "circle of control" (or, in this case, circle of responsibility) is a good, useful concept, but one thing I think it ignores is that we have a moral obligation to grow our circles of control. I shouldn't ever be content with mastery of a tiny circle of control; if the things under my control are doing well, I should expand and bring other things into that circle. If I'm taking care of myself well then it's time to start a family. If I can take care of my family well then it's time to help the community more. Starving children on Mars may not be our responsibility, but (inasmuch as we have the capacity) it is our responsibility to work towards making them our responsibility.

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