I think the most famous quote from Stalin, or at least the one most famous outside the Russian-speaking world is “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”. This looks to be an urban legend but the sentiment is certainly true. We are motivated by personal stories and can profoundly identify with the tragedy of one person (because we can visualise it and its emotional impact), but our brains are too puny to understand the immense nature of a Big Tragedy as anything but a few digits on a computer screen.

This is a documented heuristic and bias of the human brain. People will pay $80 to save 2000 birds from drowning in oil-covered ponds but only $88 to save 200,000 birds. It’s the same with humans: as the death toll mounts exponentially, our concern grows only at a linear rate. More here.

The news and media industry take immense advantage of this: relatively minor “problems” like sexting are railed against because there people to talk to and stories to tell. Meanwhile the fact that there’s a conflict that’s killed almost 6M people still going on is missed. (Of course there are many other reasons.)

This is a very hard one to avoid. It seems the only true way for a human to be as moral as possible is to become a calculating machine that only works out totals and then goes for the stuff that kills the most people. But perhaps that’s not such a bad thing — it would cause us to stop wasting trillions on nonsense like the war on terror and the war on drugs and try defeat some problems that actually kill tens of millions.

The first step is to notice this heuristic within yourself — and the reason for my post is that I noticed a particularly glaring example in myself yesterday. I have the WikiNews RSS feed and normally there are about 10 items a day which I breeze through pretty quickly. Events like terrorist attacks that kill 50-100 people at a time in Iraq and Pakistan very easily pass me by. I probably press the next key for most of them without consciously noticing the story. So what was my reaction to the story with the headline “Stones thrown by protesters in Kashmir kill civilian” ?

I stopped and clicked on the story, all the while thinking “that’s terrible!”

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