When I was little, I learned that like 100,000 people died daily. I was seriously disturbed by this, but nobody around me seemed upset.
When 9/11 hit, my parents told me 3,000 people died, and I was like "but 100,000 people died today anyway, why are you so upset about only 3k?"
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I wasn't? I mean I was technically, but I didn't understand why the method of death mattered so much, because the thing you were upset about was the person being gone, right? Why did it matter how they left?
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You realise murder is different to other forms of death, right? If we’d solved murder those 3000 never would have died. Numbers alone is a misleading way to understand the problem. This is yet another reason Bayesianism is false: coldly preferring raw numbers over actual people.
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Because it was 3000 people EXTRA, all murdered together. That's bad no matter who they are. It's why war, and the 20000 killed on one day on the Somme in WWI was so horrible.
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I think it was that they all died in one or two spots, where the 100k are spread out globally which makes it easier to swallow.
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Because when 3,000 people are murdered in a fairly unique way at one time by a mere handful of people while the nation sees it happen in real-time on the television, the emotional impact is, unsurprisingly, different (as are those deaths).
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Now check the number of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan - you can pretty much calculate an exchange rate, 1 American civilian life = x foreign civilian lives - but remember, the war on terror isn’t over yet
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I very much relate to your thought. Unfortunately stats don’t move most people, stories do. Bertrand Russell wrote beautifully “The mark of a civilised man [Human] was the capacity to weep over a column of numbers”
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it is a true story? i didn't see it as cool and edgy. At the time my parents explained it away and i accepted it, but i do like the theme of kids questioning why we're disproportionately upset at some things.
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