Comments on: Telescope Effect

By: Overcoming Bias : Telescope Effect | danielmiessler.com

Overcoming Bias : Telescope Effect | danielmiessler.com — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:49:53 +0000

[...] By Daniel Miessler on February 17th, 2010: Tagged as Culture | Psychology If you want to care more about distant victims, set aside your mental image of a large tragedy, focus your mind on one particular victim, and open your heart. If you want to care less, instead of thinking about any one victim, try to visualize a much larger group of similar victims. Now here’s the key question: do you want to care more or less? Not sure? See which image you put in your mind, long enough to act on it. via overcomingbias.com [...]

By: Captain Oblivious

Captain Oblivious — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:04:12 +0000

You're right, of course, but it highlights an uncomfortable truth: we don't help other people to make them feel better, but rather to me us feel better.

By: rePost::Overcoming Bias : Telescope Effect : On the 8 Spot

rePost::Overcoming Bias : Telescope Effect : On the 8 Spot — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 04:43:39 +0000

[...] Overcoming Bias : Telescope Effect. 0 [...]

By: Why improve nature when destroying it is so much easier? « Robert Wiblin

Why improve nature when destroying it is so much easier? « Robert Wiblin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 07:42:31 +0000

[...] we do not have much compassion for. Humans as we are currently programmed have compassion for specific animals in order to show how empathetic and loyal we are and sometimes develop more consistent compassion [...]

By: michael vassar

michael vassar — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:29:56 +0000

While I agree with the comments, I also think that we don’t want to signal that we will expend money to help distant victims as this signal has to be continually maintained by spending more money and potentially demands money without bound. We want to signal to others that we do what’s right, but more importantly we want to signal that to ourselves, but we are vague regarding what we mean by “do what’s right” and can fairly easily be made to think that it includes helping distant victims.

By: black sea

black sea — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:24:34 +0000

“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic. …”

–Stalin

By: mike

mike — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:37:45 +0000

On the other side of the coin are celebrity deaths.

Many people care about a celebrity’s death. However a common response to these people is to point out that the celebrity is only one person, and that there exist many people in the world whose deaths one should care about.

The goal of such a response can be understood then as both a way to signal ones greater scope of compassion, while diminishing the need for actual compassion towards the celebrity.

By: Phil

Phil — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:48:27 +0000

Maybe singularity7337 was trying to make a point about far mode?

By: chesh

chesh — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:34:05 +0000

This is my reading as well.

By: Granite26

Granite26 — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:57:19 +0000

This is how I feel…

Although that’s still a bit of craziness, a problem of 250,000 deaths equalling a problem of 25,000 deaths.