[jodrellblank]

"""People there are literally dying from not having food, water, and medical care."""

Like tens of thousands of people around the world every day. This is different in the media attention it has, and possibly in the geographic concentration of suffering but not in the numbers of suffering people or the type of suffering. People in Haiti were so poor they were eating mud to prolong their lives not long ago.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/29/food.internation...

People need help now, but they also needed help then when nobody was listening. It's not horrible and callous to point this out, it doesn't mean I think helping in Haiti now is a bad thing and it doesn't mean I don't feel unhappy at the level of suffering in Haiti, but ->

"""I hate to say this on hacker news, but not everything is a numbers game [..] but that largely misses the point."""

If the point is not "help as many people as possible" then what is it? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it can't be "help the most talked about issue of the moment", or "help whatever makes you feel most guilty", can it?

It's not a game, but it is a numbers thing - if what the article says is accurate then a considered response where you give to MSF instead of Yele might be helping more people. If you want to ignore things like this in your hurry then who is helped?. But if you want to help Haiti 'now now now' then giving to MSF who 'have enough for their Haiti operations for a decade' will not have any immediate effect. If more money isn't going to help, that's an incredibly important thing to consider if all you can do is give money from a long way away.

A considered action is not inherently worse than an ill considered action and the conflicts you present between thinking vs acting, wanting to help vs choosing who lives and who dies and being human vs considering are false, unhelpful.

"""It also presumes that you have the balls to say who should live and who should die."""

Humans make the live/die decision a lot, medical treatments have it implicitly, all changes to building codes to make buildings safer, all policies on water cleanliness, all women and children first habits. By choosing to help Haiti you are making the live/die decision for all the others you don't help.

Ignoring it doesn't make it go away, and thinking about it does not make a horrible callous person who is trying to play God.

[Maven911]

Your over-analyzing makes your post seem very cold and callous. Yes it's getting a lot of media attention and people are pouring in money...so what..the alternative would be to simply ignore everything like the rest of the world suffering year-round.

[jodrellblank]

"""Your over-analyzing makes your post seem very cold and callous."""

It does, but it shouldn't (or maybe it should and I am?). The parent post was exhorting me to act without thinking, and that sets off my skeptical spidey sense and makes me ask what's in it for them? It's a pressure tactic that people selling things use to get me to make a worse decision than I would otherwise make. In the case of helping people, making a worse decision is, well, worse.

A read of the article suggests that donating to some cause would be of no particular help, donating elsewhere might go to a celebrity's recording studio fees, and doing it one way might lead to it sitting in a bank account for five years being unable to help anyone. How far is over-analyzing and how far merely analyzing?

"""Yes it's getting a lot of media attention and people are pouring in money...so what"""

So the need for me to act immediately is less. So it's presenting a distorted and unbalanced view of problems in the world with the potential of over assigning to one cause and at the same time increasing suffering elsewhere because resources are reduced. So the media has a habit of turning everything into extremely opposed black and white views and a huge media fuss makes it more difficult to sift out accurate and detailed information on a topic. So a huge media fuss increases social pressure to 'donate now' without thinking and without regard for whether lack of cash is a main bottleneck or not.

"""the alternative would be to simply ignore everything like the rest of the world suffering year-round"""

That's another issue. Why is it that we happily go about our lives every day doing just that, but it's not OK to do that now? Isn't that part of the media fuss generating social pressure so that people act to be seen to be donating rather than for any other reason? Very much an 'ends justify the means' approach?