5 ms·
A million dead people, sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension, don’t matter. It’s a funny piece of human psychology. Deaths years ago or years in
by geteegudc 2y ago
A million dead people, sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension, don’t matter. It’s a funny piece of human psychology. Deaths years ago or years in the future, or in Africa or wherever. Just don’t matter to most people. Goes double when they are “other”.
- tshaddox 2y agoAren’t they not at all far from us, in any dimension whatsoever, except that they are not literally us?
- geteegudc 2y ago99% of them are far from you physically. If you weren’t personally affected it probably doesn’t matter to you. I was unlucky and lost 3 grandparents between my wife and I. Matters more to me probably.
- tshaddox 2y agoI doubt that they're disproportionately far from my physically.
- geteegudc 2y agoI am really aiming for density here. I don’t think it’s weird (or debatable) that humans don’t care as much about other humans that are far away. They care about ones that are closer. The thing is lack of density was sufficient to trigger this lack of care. Kind of interesting.
- afavour 2y ago“sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension” is where that falls apart, though. One million dead within the US alone means a lot of people were touched by COVID death.