Potential trigger warning

Like if you ask three separate groups of Canadian households how much they’ll pay to save two thousand, twenty thousand, or two hundred thousand birds from dying in oil ponds, the three groups will respectively state that they’re willing to pay seventy-eight, eighty-eight, and eighty dollars. No difference, in other words. It’s called scope insensitivity. Your brain imagines a single bird struggling in an oil pond, and that image creates some amount of emotion that determines your willingness to pay. But no one can visualize even two thousand of anything, so the quantity just gets thrown straight out the window.

– HPMOR on Scope insensitivity

2013 Boston Marathon bombing

List of wars by death toll

Iraq Body Count

Leading causes of preventable death worldwide

6 million children dying of hunger every year

[4 kids dead every minute in India just from preventable diseases

]8

As brion mentioned on IRC a while ago, us humans aren’t really doing that good, are we?

I feel helpless and crushed. I am helpless and crushed. But not as much as the 20 kids who died in this country while I was writing this post.