There are so many things to do, so how can we determine priorities? Musing on it, I thought it useful to make a tree of concerns, so that any concern can be added to the tree and put in context.
The concerns must scale from the personal to the universal. So here's my list:
The concerns must scale from the personal to the universal. So here's my list:
- Decide: determine what to do
- Individual decisions
- Shared-value decisions (e.g., most organizational decisions)
- Value-exploration decisions (values/objectives are up for debate, e.g., in democratic governance decisions)
- Survive: as an individual, family, tribe, race, or species
- A supervolcano eruption, solar super-flare, gamma ray burst, asteroid-hit or comet-hit wipes out life on Earth's surface
- Global warming destroys lots of humans (the carbon cycle) caused by mismanagement of agriculture, energy, and transportation technologies
- Disease destroys lots of humans
- Bad civil engineering leads to public health impacts (e.g., from bad water, bad sewage, road accidents, building collapses, malaria-breeding-ponds, etc.) ... often hidden inside data on deaths caused by infectious diseases such as malaria, TB, etc.and deaths from large-scale accidents (homes collapse in an earthquake because they weren't up to code, floods occur because of badly designed water management systems, etc.
- Bad chemical engineering leads to public health impacts (e.g., from chemical pollution, etc.) ... sometimes visible in cancers and hormonal diseases
- Bad public health management ... often hidden inside data on deaths caused by infectious diseases and lifestyle diseases (cardiovascular, liver, diabetes, respiratory, digestive, sexually transmitted diseases, etc.)
- Bad energy & environmental engineering (causing air, land, and water pollution) ... deaths lurk inside lung disease, heart disease, and cancer statistics
- Antibiotic resistance
- Anti-vaccine idiots cause a resurgence of old diseases
- New mutant diseases (H1N1, super-flu, etc.)
- War, Insurgency, Murder, Manslaughter, Judicial Decree, Terrorism
- Murder, Manslaughter, and Terrorism
- War, Organized Crime, Civil War, and Insurgencies
- Judicial decree (the death penalty)
- New weapons (biological, nanotech or AI/drone) that may make existing conflicts more grievous
- Famine (the nitrogen & phosphorous cycles, non-sustainable agriculture, monoculture crop wipe-out by disease, ecological breakdown, etc.)
- Water shortage (mostly stupid water-wasting projects)
- Accidents
- Road (traffic) accidents
- Industrial accidents
- Domestic accidents
- Natural disasters: earthquakes, floods, volcanoes
- Suicide
- Personal (biological) lifespan extension
- Thrive: to improve the standard of living in various different ways
- Sufficient food, clothing and shelter for everyone
- Access to energy, healthcare, education, transportation
- Removal of parasitic losses in provision of goods and services (where funds or goods are diverted before they reach the beneficiaries, such as free state services becoming unavailable due to absenteeism and low productivity of state employees, siphoning of funds from state projects, electricity transmission losses, deliberate bad loan origination by banks, etc.)
- Better health
- More leisure time
- Better food and drink
- Better enjoyment & entertainment
- Nurture: to help others (including other species or objects) to survive and thrive
- Pets and domestic animals
- Plants and animals of agricultural, commercial, and aesthetic value
- All life on Earth
- All life in the Universe
https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from
ReplyDeleteThe discrepancy between what we die actually from and what we get informed of in the media is what stands out:
around one-third of the considered causes of deaths resulted from heart disease, yet this cause of death receives only 2-3 percent of Google searches and media coverage;
just under one-third of the deaths came from cancer; we actually google cancer a lot (37 percent of searches) and it is a popular entry here on our site; but it receives only 13-14 percent of media coverage;
we searched for road incidents more frequently than their share of deaths, however, they receive much less attention in the news;
when it comes to deaths from strokes, Google searches and media coverage are surprisingly balanced;
the largest discrepancies concern violent forms of death: suicide, homicide and terrorism. All three receive much more relative attention in Google searches and media coverage than their relative share of deaths. When it comes to the media coverage on causes of death, violent deaths account for more than two-thirds of coverage in the New York Times and The Guardian but account for less than 3 percent of the total deaths in the US.
What's interesting is that Americans search on Google is a much closer reflection of what kills us than what is presented in the media
https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death
ReplyDeleteBy age and country
1.7.2, deaths due to Industrial accidents: in India, the corrupt negligence of government officials in letting people live in the buffer zones around hazardous plants causes deaths. Recent examples are LG Polymers in Visakhapatnam (2020) and Dombivili (2016).
ReplyDeletehttps://www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/lg-polymers-gross-human-failure-lack-of-training-caused-vizag-gas-leak-says-ngt-report/story/405423.html
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/dombivli-blast-maharashtra-plans-safety-moves-but-experts-doubt-effectiveness/story-SEXNmpOzRepDibcPRD91CK.html
https://sjbpublichealth.org/200-years-public-health-doubled-life-expectancy/
ReplyDeleteOn layers of risk, and the problem of "no lower threshold" causes. Such as AQI.
ReplyDeleteFor each place, we could stack the causes by effects, and do a cost/benefit trade-off. Problem: the recommendation (stay inside on high AQI days) can be toxic because it increases problems caused by lethargy and stress.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(19)30262-1/fulltext
https://freaktakes.substack.com/p/we-won-the-war-on-infectious-diseases?
ReplyDeleteRef the cause of mortality rate reduction:
many changes affecting public health from the early 1900s played a role. These include: the expanded use of window screens to keep disease-carrying bugs out of the home, the establishment of the FDA, horses being phased out by the internal combustion engine which left streets much more sanitary, and more.
But, based on the work of Grant Miller and David Cutler, there seems to be a single intervention that might have been almost as important as all the others combined in bringing about change: cleaner water sources. The implementation of these improved water management systems might be the most impressive work ever carried out by this country’s city governments.
https://disputeresolution.online/
ReplyDeleteOnline Dispute Resolution for solving the small-cases arbitration needs
https://thoughtscapism.com/2018/12/13/toward-more-intuitive-toxicology-information/
ReplyDeleteOn food-toxin risks and regulatory limits
https://twitter.com/ChrisMasterjohn/status/1664785355864719360?s=19
ReplyDeleteHave vaccines saved millions of lives?
The best place to start to answer this question is Thomas McKeown’s 1976 “The Modern Rise of Population.”
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799627128143873?s=19
ReplyDeleteOn US life expectancy:
...deaths at early ages erase far more life than even a large number of older folks dying slightly early. More years of American lives were erased by drugs, guns, & road deaths in 2021 alone than from Covid during the whole pandemic.