I won't stand for Carter slander: he was a darn good president too. What he wasn't good at, was politicking, and that was because he also was a good man, to a fault. He gave an honest answer to a question on if he had ever lusted after a woman who was not his wife, and reaped a scandal.
This is amazing, those things are an absolutely nasty parasite from out of a sci-fi horror movie. If you drink contaminated water with them it releases its larva into your body which burrow out of your digestive systems into your body consuming your nutrients for a year or more as it grows, then migrates towards your legs and creates debilitatingly painful blisters trying to force its way out over the course of weeks, and when you submerge the wound in water to relieve the burning pain it releases its larva into the water to infect others. Also don't try to pull it out even when its halfway out of your body or it will snap and die and give you a super nasty infection as it decays inside of you.
Ivermectin is a very good dewormer! Most 2020 crap studies were easy to make because ivermectin was already distributed to big populations as a dewormer.
I'm the guy that every time someone calls it a good horse dewormer I reply:
"And a good human dewormer too!"
True. But you can't get a prescription for the human version unless you actually have worms. So if you're taking it for some other reason, you're probably getting the version for horses, which you can buy by the bucket.
Anything that annihilates bed bugs is a net positive to the world. Drinking poison out of spite for those sons of the devil is well within reason. To hell with those infralings.
I worked for the Carter Center in South Sudan for a little less than a year in 2011. It was an extraordinarily tough job and required perseverance, humility, creative problem solving, negotiation, and acceptance. Events outside our control, like civil war, made eradication even harder.
The Carter Center teams should be very proud of what they accomplished. It would’ve been nice to get it done before Jimmy passed though
Consider what you might choose to do for the public good with the 30% of your income that is taken from you in the name of the public good.
Philanthropy is a predictable outcome of an individual having met the basic needs of Maslow’s hierarchy. Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment.
If you've ever worked with a church you know that donation and good will is not a way to ensure anything is structurally sound. Donations always come with asterisks.
Nobody wants to make sure the roof is shingled and doesn't leak but everybody leaves money for new stained glass windows or the organ that nobody knows how to play.
> Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment.
Many, many fewer than you assume.
Libertarians like to make lots of good-sounding promises to justify their favored radical policy, but it's bullshit and the promises don't pan out when tested [1]. By that point, the libertarian has gotten what he wanted and moved on.
[1] Or their policy was already tried and already failed, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876387, leading to reforms to fix the problems that they're now mad about and want to undo.
Is there evidence that it happens? And that it serves the public good, not the personal interests of the wealthy? Do we need another $100 million given to a health program accessible only to the wealthy, or funding for public health? To a business school or art museum, or to arts programs for public schools?
Philanthropy is anti-democratic; the people don't choose what is important to support, the wealthy few do. You can see that in the relatively poor public goods in the US, which has much lower taxes relative to peers.
Eradication of the Guinea worm will be one of the huge milestones in the history of humankind. Just reading about them is nightmarish. In 1986 estimated 3,500,000 people had an infestation. Now we're well below 100. However eradication also needs animal cases to go to zero which are still in the hundreds.
Anyway, really great news about humanity beating one of its many terrible enemies just like the Malaria vaccine.
I mentioned in another comment how hard it is for our brains to really comprehend the orders of magnitude difference between all animal cases (~680) and the former number of human cases (3.5M).
It would take ~5000 years at the current annual rate of animal cases to match the number of human cases just 40 years ago.
That's The Great Pyramid of Giza ago time... PLUS the amount of time since Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael roamed the earth.
The cool thing is that at a few hundred, one could theoretically* round up all (known) animal cases left. That's truly incredible work getting to this point if you think about it.
* Yes, geopolitical issues, geography, and plenty of other reasons might make this somewhat impossible... but the fact that we can actively picture a few hundred animals in our brains means that it's a very attainable goal.
The eradication program works by offering cash rewards for reporting cases in areas where the worm is present. Those reports are then investigated and followed to prevent transmission and identify the source.
Clever. I wonder if the same model can be reused for other diseases.
Any individual presenting with the disease who meets all the criteria for containment is now rewarded with 500 South Sudanese pounds (SSP). The informer is given 100 SSP.
I’m not sure it is clever, because you’re bound to get an entrepreneur who infects their local school to farm rewards. It’s inevitable with these kinds of schemes.
From the article it looks like they are working on that too
> To fully eradicate the disease, cases in animals (infected by the same species of worm) must also be wiped out. In 2025, animal cases were detected in Chad (147 cases), Mali (17), Cameroon (445), Angola (70), Ethiopia (1), and South Sudan (3).
Those are bonkers (low) numbers compared to the 3.5M (human?) cases if I'm to believe the GPs comment.
It's also crazy how much Mother Theresa's quote rings true, even in reverse ("If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.") When I initially read 3.5M cases, I thought "wow, that's a lot", and somehow the 445 animal cases in Cameroon felt (at first) more real and similarly "a lot".
No comment other than interesting how our human brains work and distort how numbers "feel".
Once my rational brain kicked in, realized that's over 5,000 years for the current number of animal cases to match the former number of human cases. The future is awesome.
It was a somewhat recent discovery that there were animal reservoirs escaping detection. Carter had hoped to outlive the worm, but it was thought that the animal pools were going to make full eradication take an additional 20 years.
glancing at the wikipedia page on the topic it seems that it is limited to dogs, cat and baboons, and animal hosts have been only proved in the 2010s, so I guess they are unlikely to become infected by the parasite
I think the worm reproduce better in humans, so if we can cut humans the population in other animals will hopefully decrease. (And probably add a plan to identify and capture infected animals, to ensure this.)
You are right. Wikipedia write it is limited to dogs, cat and baboons, and that animal hosts have been only proved in the 2010s, so I guess they are unlikely to become infected by the parasite
It probably helps that the worms don't care. That is, a worm whose ancestors lived in dogs can live in a human no problem and vice versa.
If you eradicate GWD in your region but, eh, not in dogs, well people in your region keep getting GWD anyway. But if you eliminate it entirely you're just done. So that's a strong incentive to ensure the latter.
Most drastic options are probably available in the afflicted countries than would be acceptable in many places that haven't had GWD for a hundred years or more. If you tell the population of rural France that military and police are going to start shooting wild animals dead as a disease control measure there will be mass protests. But in South Sudan hey, at least you aren't proposing to shoot all the members of some minority ethnic group.
> To fully eradicate the disease, cases in animals (infected by the same species of worm) must also be wiped out. In 2025, animal cases were detected in Chad (147 cases), Mali (17), Cameroon (445), Angola (70), Ethiopia (1), and South Sudan (3).
Isn't fewer than 1000 infected animals in an area that covers 6 countries pretty good? Obviously there's still work to do, but I would have expected hundreds of thousands or millions of animal cases if it was an epidemic
Few cases is good, but if there are any, the whole machinery of surveillance, treatment, and education has to be in place. As soon as we reach 0 cases for a certain amount of time, all those resources can be redirected to other neglected tropical diseases that haven't been wiped out, like onchocerciasis, loa loa, yaws, lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, and all the others. Yaws in particular is a good candidate for eradication.
Please share this with someone who doesn't know the story yet. Ingenuity alone can't save our species. We also need the will to do good. We are living through a moment of deep cynicism about our ability to solve existential problems. Let this be a reminder of what we are capable of.
Cultivating optimism is the first step. Optimism is irrational, you can just choose to have it (of course thinking about good things that have happened helps). Optimism is the precondition for doing good.
So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
I mostly agree with what you said, but disagree on one point:
> Optimism is the precondition for doing good.
It is still possible to do good when things are bleak and there is no possible way out - just because doing good is the right thing[1]. Optimism helps a lot for morale, but is not a precondition.
1. e.g. the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine.
> the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine
Optimism doesn't necessarily mean hope. It can mean belief in an afterlife. An end to a suffering. Or gratitude for having someone else in a terrible moment.
I think OP is correct. You can't have good without optimism. Your point, which is also correct, is you can do good without hope.
The philosophical definition just opens up bigger cans of worms that can't be adequately addressed in an HN thread, and have been debated for thousands of years: what is "good"? Perhaps we need a moral framework to answer that, but then, what are morals? "You can't have good without optimism" is a declaration that has to be contextualized, and is far from universal.
I suspect answers couched in terms of individualism will always sound inadequate to questions that are inherently collectivist, such as why people do things "for the greater good" detrimental to their own well-being.
That is an argument of the pessimists and enemies of the good.
Pessimism is clearly irrational: Look at the world we live in; look what humanity has achieved since the Enlightenment, and in the last century - freedom, peace, and prosperity have swept the world. Diseases are wiped out, we visit the moon and (robotically) other planets, the Internet, etc. etc. etc.
To be pessimistic about our ability to build a better world is bizarre.
Pessimism and optimism are philosophical perspectives (dispositions) and do not necessarily have anything do with doing good or doing bad. Why do you think optimism only precipitates good things? Surely you can imagine a situation (or many) where thinking more positively about a situation than the data warrants leads to bad outcomes?
None of your examples above tie directly to an optimistic disposition. How could you possibly know the disposition of the thousands of humans involved in those endeavors? You are letting your personal disposition color your view of the world (as we all do) and mistaking this for some sort of absolute truth.
> So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
The problem is, that way of thinking is just like the "co2 footprint" - individualise responsibility from where it belongs (=the government) to individual people, and let's be real, outside of the very last action item many people don't have the time and/or the money.
At some point, we (as in: virtually all Western nations) have to acknowledge that our governments are utter dogshit and demand better. Optimism requires trust in that what you work for doesn't get senselessly destroyed the next election cycle.
Okay but also we all still live in democracies, and people are fairly obviously getting what they vote for a lot of the time.
Extrrnalising that to "the government" is to pretend you had no say, or to collectively try and pretend everyone else is with you & which they observably are not.
Edit: and before anyone responds with to me with a quip about money and corporations - money in politics buys advertising and campaigning. It doesn't buy votes directly, and when it does that's corruption and what's done about that is still largely on you the voter to set your priorities at the ballot box.
> I am just increasingly pessimistic about our collective desire to do so.
It's not just a lack of desire (apathy). People who want to solve big, collective problems are increasingly up against groups who actively want to not solve the problems and/or make the problems worse. COVID, for example, was so much worse than it had to be, purely from people actively fighting efforts meant to contain it. Efforts to reverse or mitigate Climate Change are routinely and vigorously opposed.
When the the only thing CEOs talk about for every new technology is how many people they are going to put out of work because of it, the collective desire for new technology and progress is understandably lessened.
For news about things that are going right, I suggest https://fixthenews.com/. You can get a free weekly email about progress in energy and the environment, national economies, health and medicine, crime etc (or pay for a longer weekly email).
That you have the mental capacity/structures/language to form the thought should indicate the trajectory you're caught up within. It's disappointing that everything not's resolved during the blip you're you but even a moderately long view provides evidence for optimism.
It will rewire the hard sacrifice of limiting individual wealth to less than a billion dollars per person. Trajectory of present indicates we won't be doing that soon.
It is interesting, I wonder is it possible to get so rich and be kind, probably examples. I'm the kind poor person myself even what money I have I have given too much of it away. In which case I'm a dumbass for doing so but yeah.
> Maybe I need to to separate the art from the artist?
Yes. We die but the consequences of our actions resonate indefinitely. Ideas make good idols and people do not. Better Родина-мать зовёт! (a statue in Stalingrad approximately "Motherland [ie Russia] calls") and Liberty, which are both definitely statues about ideas than the Lincoln Memorial for example, or even arguably the "Statue of Unity" which is named for Unity but in practice is explicitly a statue of a specific man - Sardar Patel.
In the US one can retire comfortably on $3 million without relying on Social Security. From the downvotes, it's crazy to me that people think a limit of 300 "ordinary people's" retirements is unreasonable.
I really don't think people understand how little difference there is between having $1 billion and $10 billion or even $100 billion. It makes no difference whatsoever to have that much money; they can't enjoy it.
It's always been that way. People have wanted to do things and others have said "You want to do that? Before you do this?" and so on. The US moon landing was contemporaneous with Whitey On The Moon. There are people who constantly care about things and work on incremental improvements to them that slowly collectively yield an outcome. That's just the mechanism that works.
As an example, consider the Guinea Worm Eradication Program. In theory, sheer bloodymindedness and mass effort could have yielded the majority of the initial effects for great suppression. But the application of modern technology (and I include incentive system design in this category) brings the cost down sufficiently for successful eradication.
Suppression of the disease is possible with old techniques: case maps, word of mouth reporting, logbooks. Now detection to containment is far faster because of digital technology. You can't just dump temephos on everything. You need to target application.
The transmission of data specifically is a problem that most people discount the difficulty of. As an example that more people will be able to relate to, there was a delay in the October 2025 jobs report and it was finally released without an unemployment rate. Many people didn't get why it was hard.
One viral tweet (mirrored by others) went:
> Can't we just...
> (rubs temples)
> Can't we just divide the number of unemployed workers by the work force population? Isn't that the unemployment rate?
But you don't know what those two numbers are. You need machinery to get it. The machinery has a lot of middle management. It cannot function without.
Society today is a complex thing. To get insight into it you need a lot of infrastructure. The fact that we all have electric power, that roads across the country are reliable, that bridges are all up, that planes fly and trains run, is a marvel. It's a marvel enabled by all the bits that people work on, all the boring bits: yes, even procurement software. And yes, corporate law and bureaucracy. All of these things make this possible.
I think a very common thing in online forums is to look at a flowering tree and say "Oh, look at the flowers. They are so beautiful. Instead of such ugly bark and wood why don't we make more flowers?". Building the society that has the muscle to do this is part of making things like this happen.
This is a Western-centric and specifically Americentric viewpoint. There are plenty in the East for example who are not cynical about their ability to solve existential problems and are instead plowing ahead on solving them, such as massive investment in non-petroleum-based energy sources like solar, wind, and nuclear.
"South Korea is second from bottom on our list in terms of the proportion of people saying their country “is heading in the right direction”, with only 15% stating so. A similar sentiment is also felt about the economy. Pessimism is usually the standard for South Korea; however, their economic indicator score has been particularly low in recent times, with just 8% believing the economy is “good”."
I'm not talking about how people feel about their life or country but about the concrete actions their governments are taking to improve their quality of life. For example, they all have high speed rail, something that is essentially impossible to build in the US, whether it be due to budget, regulations or sheer political will.
Florida's Brightline contradicts that, no matter how slow California's HSR project is going. Trust in greed if nothing else. The next one to go up will be LA to Las Vegas.
Thanks, Carter!
https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/
best _former_ president of all time.
I won't stand for Carter slander: he was a darn good president too. What he wasn't good at, was politicking, and that was because he also was a good man, to a fault. He gave an honest answer to a question on if he had ever lusted after a woman who was not his wife, and reaped a scandal.
This is amazing, those things are an absolutely nasty parasite from out of a sci-fi horror movie. If you drink contaminated water with them it releases its larva into your body which burrow out of your digestive systems into your body consuming your nutrients for a year or more as it grows, then migrates towards your legs and creates debilitatingly painful blisters trying to force its way out over the course of weeks, and when you submerge the wound in water to relieve the burning pain it releases its larva into the water to infect others. Also don't try to pull it out even when its halfway out of your body or it will snap and die and give you a super nasty infection as it decays inside of you.
I was going to say, "finally something that ivermectin can help with!" except https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7974686/
Ivermectin is a very good dewormer! Most 2020 crap studies were easy to make because ivermectin was already distributed to big populations as a dewormer.
I'm the guy that every time someone calls it a good horse dewormer I reply: "And a good human dewormer too!"
True. But you can't get a prescription for the human version unless you actually have worms. So if you're taking it for some other reason, you're probably getting the version for horses, which you can buy by the bucket.
It also poisons any bed bugs feeding on you.
Anything that annihilates bed bugs is a net positive to the world. Drinking poison out of spite for those sons of the devil is well within reason. To hell with those infralings.
I worked for the Carter Center in South Sudan for a little less than a year in 2011. It was an extraordinarily tough job and required perseverance, humility, creative problem solving, negotiation, and acceptance. Events outside our control, like civil war, made eradication even harder.
The Carter Center teams should be very proud of what they accomplished. It would’ve been nice to get it done before Jimmy passed though
The free market could never accomplish something like this.
Maybe not just the free market but the Carter Center funding was 7% governments, 90% foundations, corporations and individuals. (fye 2024)
We nobody could ever achieve something like this without a free market taking care of most things.
There's no such thing as the "free market". It's a foolish propaganda term to try and assign people's actions to a philosophy they don't care about.
Consider what you might choose to do for the public good with the 30% of your income that is taken from you in the name of the public good.
Philanthropy is a predictable outcome of an individual having met the basic needs of Maslow’s hierarchy. Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment.
> Consider what you might choose to do…
Emphasis on might.
Evidence suggests "a giant boat and some helicopters" is the more likely result.
Which 30% are you talking about? Taxes? If so: From what do you build things like infrastructure?
If you've ever worked with a church you know that donation and good will is not a way to ensure anything is structurally sound. Donations always come with asterisks.
Nobody wants to make sure the roof is shingled and doesn't leak but everybody leaves money for new stained glass windows or the organ that nobody knows how to play.
Well my taxes go to roads, healthcare for people who can’t afford, schools, and the fire department. I would consider those public goods.
A lot less because they'd be dead from easily preventable diseases in their water supply?
> Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment.
Many, many fewer than you assume.
Libertarians like to make lots of good-sounding promises to justify their favored radical policy, but it's bullshit and the promises don't pan out when tested [1]. By that point, the libertarian has gotten what he wanted and moved on.
[1] Or their policy was already tried and already failed, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876387, leading to reforms to fix the problems that they're now mad about and want to undo.
The billionaires out there are being revealed as paedophiles quicker than they are solving world health problems.
I’d prefer not to rely on them.
Is there evidence that it happens? And that it serves the public good, not the personal interests of the wealthy? Do we need another $100 million given to a health program accessible only to the wealthy, or funding for public health? To a business school or art museum, or to arts programs for public schools?
Philanthropy is anti-democratic; the people don't choose what is important to support, the wealthy few do. You can see that in the relatively poor public goods in the US, which has much lower taxes relative to peers.
Eradication of the Guinea worm will be one of the huge milestones in the history of humankind. Just reading about them is nightmarish. In 1986 estimated 3,500,000 people had an infestation. Now we're well below 100. However eradication also needs animal cases to go to zero which are still in the hundreds.
Anyway, really great news about humanity beating one of its many terrible enemies just like the Malaria vaccine.
I mentioned in another comment how hard it is for our brains to really comprehend the orders of magnitude difference between all animal cases (~680) and the former number of human cases (3.5M).
It would take ~5000 years at the current annual rate of animal cases to match the number of human cases just 40 years ago.
That's The Great Pyramid of Giza ago time... PLUS the amount of time since Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael roamed the earth.
The cool thing is that at a few hundred, one could theoretically* round up all (known) animal cases left. That's truly incredible work getting to this point if you think about it.
* Yes, geopolitical issues, geography, and plenty of other reasons might make this somewhat impossible... but the fact that we can actively picture a few hundred animals in our brains means that it's a very attainable goal.
The eradication program works by offering cash rewards for reporting cases in areas where the worm is present. Those reports are then investigated and followed to prevent transmission and identify the source.
Clever. I wonder if the same model can be reused for other diseases.
An example:
https://www.who.int/news/item/11-04-2014-south-sudan-introdu...
Any individual presenting with the disease who meets all the criteria for containment is now rewarded with 500 South Sudanese pounds (SSP). The informer is given 100 SSP.
I’m not sure it is clever, because you’re bound to get an entrepreneur who infects their local school to farm rewards. It’s inevitable with these kinds of schemes.
500 SSP is about 4 USD. If you have the ability to come up with the scheme, you can do better with pretty much anything else.
You then create a bigger bounty to identify the entrepreneurs, and now it's bounties all the way down.
Somehow it seems to have worked here. There's probably a bit more to the secret sauce.
The decrease from 3.5 million cases to only 15 is impressive but I don't see how we can eradicate zoonoses
From the article it looks like they are working on that too
> To fully eradicate the disease, cases in animals (infected by the same species of worm) must also be wiped out. In 2025, animal cases were detected in Chad (147 cases), Mali (17), Cameroon (445), Angola (70), Ethiopia (1), and South Sudan (3).
Those are bonkers (low) numbers compared to the 3.5M (human?) cases if I'm to believe the GPs comment.
It's also crazy how much Mother Theresa's quote rings true, even in reverse ("If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.") When I initially read 3.5M cases, I thought "wow, that's a lot", and somehow the 445 animal cases in Cameroon felt (at first) more real and similarly "a lot".
No comment other than interesting how our human brains work and distort how numbers "feel".
Once my rational brain kicked in, realized that's over 5,000 years for the current number of animal cases to match the former number of human cases. The future is awesome.
If you halve the cases every year you'll eradicate it in a generation.
It was a somewhat recent discovery that there were animal reservoirs escaping detection. Carter had hoped to outlive the worm, but it was thought that the animal pools were going to make full eradication take an additional 20 years.
But the question would be how many more go undetected in those animals. (I.e if wild animals carry it, how accurate are these numbers).
glancing at the wikipedia page on the topic it seems that it is limited to dogs, cat and baboons, and animal hosts have been only proved in the 2010s, so I guess they are unlikely to become infected by the parasite
I think the worm reproduce better in humans, so if we can cut humans the population in other animals will hopefully decrease. (And probably add a plan to identify and capture infected animals, to ensure this.)
You are right. Wikipedia write it is limited to dogs, cat and baboons, and that animal hosts have been only proved in the 2010s, so I guess they are unlikely to become infected by the parasite
It probably helps that the worms don't care. That is, a worm whose ancestors lived in dogs can live in a human no problem and vice versa.
If you eradicate GWD in your region but, eh, not in dogs, well people in your region keep getting GWD anyway. But if you eliminate it entirely you're just done. So that's a strong incentive to ensure the latter.
Most drastic options are probably available in the afflicted countries than would be acceptable in many places that haven't had GWD for a hundred years or more. If you tell the population of rural France that military and police are going to start shooting wild animals dead as a disease control measure there will be mass protests. But in South Sudan hey, at least you aren't proposing to shoot all the members of some minority ethnic group.
>In 2024, there were just 15 cases, and, according to the provisional tally for 2025, the number is down to just 10.
Take THAT, God! ;-)
It's a peculiarity of the 21st century that the people most likely to blame God for human events are, in fact, atheists.
Where in this thread is someone blaming god for anything? Who in this is atheist? What?
You seem very confused. Try reading the comment I replied to and then understanding the context.
> only 10 cases in 2025
10 _known_ cases
Sounds like there is still some way to go:
> To fully eradicate the disease, cases in animals (infected by the same species of worm) must also be wiped out. In 2025, animal cases were detected in Chad (147 cases), Mali (17), Cameroon (445), Angola (70), Ethiopia (1), and South Sudan (3).
Isn't fewer than 1000 infected animals in an area that covers 6 countries pretty good? Obviously there's still work to do, but I would have expected hundreds of thousands or millions of animal cases if it was an epidemic
Few cases is good, but if there are any, the whole machinery of surveillance, treatment, and education has to be in place. As soon as we reach 0 cases for a certain amount of time, all those resources can be redirected to other neglected tropical diseases that haven't been wiped out, like onchocerciasis, loa loa, yaws, lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, and all the others. Yaws in particular is a good candidate for eradication.
Please share this with someone who doesn't know the story yet. Ingenuity alone can't save our species. We also need the will to do good. We are living through a moment of deep cynicism about our ability to solve existential problems. Let this be a reminder of what we are capable of.
> We are living through a moment of deep cynicism about our ability to solve existential problems.
I have no doubt that we can create a really miraculous future. I am just increasingly pessimistic about our collective desire to do so.
Cultivating optimism is the first step. Optimism is irrational, you can just choose to have it (of course thinking about good things that have happened helps). Optimism is the precondition for doing good.
So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
I mostly agree with what you said, but disagree on one point:
> Optimism is the precondition for doing good.
It is still possible to do good when things are bleak and there is no possible way out - just because doing good is the right thing[1]. Optimism helps a lot for morale, but is not a precondition.
1. e.g. the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine.
> the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine
Optimism doesn't necessarily mean hope. It can mean belief in an afterlife. An end to a suffering. Or gratitude for having someone else in a terrible moment.
I think OP is correct. You can't have good without optimism. Your point, which is also correct, is you can do good without hope.
From the Oxford dictionary:
op·ti·mism (noun): hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something.
The term has a philosophical heritage way richer than a dictionary one liner. I’m using one that makes OP’s statement make sense.
The philosophical definition just opens up bigger cans of worms that can't be adequately addressed in an HN thread, and have been debated for thousands of years: what is "good"? Perhaps we need a moral framework to answer that, but then, what are morals? "You can't have good without optimism" is a declaration that has to be contextualized, and is far from universal.
I suspect answers couched in terms of individualism will always sound inadequate to questions that are inherently collectivist, such as why people do things "for the greater good" detrimental to their own well-being.
Wouldn't say optimism is irrational. There are good things happening in the world in spite of all the bad things in the world.
Pessimism that leads to a self fulfilling prophecy is irrational, but you still need a win. A win is fuel.
Choosing a belief that is more desirable than the most likely case, is by definition irrational, and can be called optimistic.
Choosing a belief that is less desirable than the most likely, is equally irrational, clearly pessimistic, and often self-fulfilling.
So the ideal belief system is irrational (optimistic) but only to a chosen and realistic extent.
Somewhere between Pollyanna and Eeyore, but more P than E. And as irrational psychologies go, moderate-P is by far the more successful of the two.
> Cultivating optimism is the first step
I agree with this, and I recognize it as the good intentions behind faith communities.
People are (statistically) terrible at creating optimism on a blank canvas. They need narratives and common points of understanding.
And then the other side of human nature gets to take its swing at the mass of optimistic people with a shared belief system. :)
You do not need optimism to do good. It helps motivate, but its not required.
> Optimism is irrational
That is an argument of the pessimists and enemies of the good.
Pessimism is clearly irrational: Look at the world we live in; look what humanity has achieved since the Enlightenment, and in the last century - freedom, peace, and prosperity have swept the world. Diseases are wiped out, we visit the moon and (robotically) other planets, the Internet, etc. etc. etc.
To be pessimistic about our ability to build a better world is bizarre.
Pessimism and optimism are philosophical perspectives (dispositions) and do not necessarily have anything do with doing good or doing bad. Why do you think optimism only precipitates good things? Surely you can imagine a situation (or many) where thinking more positively about a situation than the data warrants leads to bad outcomes?
> Surely you can imagine a situation (or many) where thinking more positively about a situation than the data warrants leads to bad outcomes?
We're not talking about hypotheticals - we can always construct hypotheticals that yield the answer we desire - but the real world.
None of your examples above tie directly to an optimistic disposition. How could you possibly know the disposition of the thousands of humans involved in those endeavors? You are letting your personal disposition color your view of the world (as we all do) and mistaking this for some sort of absolute truth.
> So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
The problem is, that way of thinking is just like the "co2 footprint" - individualise responsibility from where it belongs (=the government) to individual people, and let's be real, outside of the very last action item many people don't have the time and/or the money.
At some point, we (as in: virtually all Western nations) have to acknowledge that our governments are utter dogshit and demand better. Optimism requires trust in that what you work for doesn't get senselessly destroyed the next election cycle.
Okay but also we all still live in democracies, and people are fairly obviously getting what they vote for a lot of the time.
Extrrnalising that to "the government" is to pretend you had no say, or to collectively try and pretend everyone else is with you & which they observably are not.
Edit: and before anyone responds with to me with a quip about money and corporations - money in politics buys advertising and campaigning. It doesn't buy votes directly, and when it does that's corruption and what's done about that is still largely on you the voter to set your priorities at the ballot box.
> I am just increasingly pessimistic about our collective desire to do so.
It's not just a lack of desire (apathy). People who want to solve big, collective problems are increasingly up against groups who actively want to not solve the problems and/or make the problems worse. COVID, for example, was so much worse than it had to be, purely from people actively fighting efforts meant to contain it. Efforts to reverse or mitigate Climate Change are routinely and vigorously opposed.
When the the only thing CEOs talk about for every new technology is how many people they are going to put out of work because of it, the collective desire for new technology and progress is understandably lessened.
For news about things that are going right, I suggest https://fixthenews.com/. You can get a free weekly email about progress in energy and the environment, national economies, health and medicine, crime etc (or pay for a longer weekly email).
As they say, pessimists sound smart, optimists get things done (and make money along the way, if that is the goal).
That you have the mental capacity/structures/language to form the thought should indicate the trajectory you're caught up within. It's disappointing that everything not's resolved during the blip you're you but even a moderately long view provides evidence for optimism.
It will rewire the hard sacrifice of limiting individual wealth to less than a billion dollars per person. Trajectory of present indicates we won't be doing that soon.
It would be interesting to know what portion of people disagree with your suggested cap, and why.
It is interesting, I wonder is it possible to get so rich and be kind, probably examples. I'm the kind poor person myself even what money I have I have given too much of it away. In which case I'm a dumbass for doing so but yeah.
The Gates Foundation used to be something that gave me hope. The recent revelations have coloured that.
Maybe I need to to separate the art from the artist?
Yeah... I still listen to Drake for ex
> Maybe I need to to separate the art from the artist?
Yes. We die but the consequences of our actions resonate indefinitely. Ideas make good idols and people do not. Better Родина-мать зовёт! (a statue in Stalingrad approximately "Motherland [ie Russia] calls") and Liberty, which are both definitely statues about ideas than the Lincoln Memorial for example, or even arguably the "Statue of Unity" which is named for Unity but in practice is explicitly a statue of a specific man - Sardar Patel.
I like this comment, as it both supports The Gates Foundation and condemns Bill Gates.
I would at the very least index it to inflation.
In the US one can retire comfortably on $3 million without relying on Social Security. From the downvotes, it's crazy to me that people think a limit of 300 "ordinary people's" retirements is unreasonable.
I really don't think people understand how little difference there is between having $1 billion and $10 billion or even $100 billion. It makes no difference whatsoever to have that much money; they can't enjoy it.
It's always been that way. People have wanted to do things and others have said "You want to do that? Before you do this?" and so on. The US moon landing was contemporaneous with Whitey On The Moon. There are people who constantly care about things and work on incremental improvements to them that slowly collectively yield an outcome. That's just the mechanism that works.
As an example, consider the Guinea Worm Eradication Program. In theory, sheer bloodymindedness and mass effort could have yielded the majority of the initial effects for great suppression. But the application of modern technology (and I include incentive system design in this category) brings the cost down sufficiently for successful eradication.
Suppression of the disease is possible with old techniques: case maps, word of mouth reporting, logbooks. Now detection to containment is far faster because of digital technology. You can't just dump temephos on everything. You need to target application.
The transmission of data specifically is a problem that most people discount the difficulty of. As an example that more people will be able to relate to, there was a delay in the October 2025 jobs report and it was finally released without an unemployment rate. Many people didn't get why it was hard.
One viral tweet (mirrored by others) went:
> Can't we just...
> (rubs temples)
> Can't we just divide the number of unemployed workers by the work force population? Isn't that the unemployment rate?
But you don't know what those two numbers are. You need machinery to get it. The machinery has a lot of middle management. It cannot function without.
Society today is a complex thing. To get insight into it you need a lot of infrastructure. The fact that we all have electric power, that roads across the country are reliable, that bridges are all up, that planes fly and trains run, is a marvel. It's a marvel enabled by all the bits that people work on, all the boring bits: yes, even procurement software. And yes, corporate law and bureaucracy. All of these things make this possible.
I think a very common thing in online forums is to look at a flowering tree and say "Oh, look at the flowers. They are so beautiful. Instead of such ugly bark and wood why don't we make more flowers?". Building the society that has the muscle to do this is part of making things like this happen.
This is a Western-centric and specifically Americentric viewpoint. There are plenty in the East for example who are not cynical about their ability to solve existential problems and are instead plowing ahead on solving them, such as massive investment in non-petroleum-based energy sources like solar, wind, and nuclear.
Pessimism is not a uniquely American viewpoint.
"South Korea is second from bottom on our list in terms of the proportion of people saying their country “is heading in the right direction”, with only 15% stating so. A similar sentiment is also felt about the economy. Pessimism is usually the standard for South Korea; however, their economic indicator score has been particularly low in recent times, with just 8% believing the economy is “good”."
https://www.ipsos.com/en-ch/what-worries-world-may-2025?utm_...
I'm not talking about how people feel about their life or country but about the concrete actions their governments are taking to improve their quality of life. For example, they all have high speed rail, something that is essentially impossible to build in the US, whether it be due to budget, regulations or sheer political will.
Florida's Brightline contradicts that, no matter how slow California's HSR project is going. Trust in greed if nothing else. The next one to go up will be LA to Las Vegas.
RFK Jr: “Not so fast”