Normal Human Heroes

For my senior honor’s thesis I’m researching the implicit assumptions underlying the use of generally misguided statistics in genetic studies. Some time ago I read through the recent book ”How Doctor’s Think”. It didn’t turn out to be very useful for my project, but it was written well and interesting. There’s a few patient stories, one detailing a misdiagnosis of an adopted Vietnamese infant thought to have an immune deficiency. A section at the end of it bothered me:
“Shira received her morning feeding through the tube, and then Rachel went to the end of the hospital corridor to a pay phone. She called one of her closest friends from her congregation and told her the news.
“It’s so wonderful,” her friend exclaimed. But then there was a long silence.
Rachel wondered what was wrong.
“Turn on your TV.”
Rachel stood frozen in the room and felt as if her heart, so full of joy, were being torn. At the moment she celebrated Shira’s restored life, thousands were likely dead in the attack on the World Trade Center. How can I rejoice when God’s creatures are dying?
Forty-five days after Rachel and Shira went to the Children’s Hospital ER, mother and daughter left for home. It was Friday, just hours before the onset of the Sabbath. When Rachel turned the key and entered her apartment in Brookline, she could smell the meal left by friends. Two candles stood ready to be lit, two fresh challahs ready to be savored. Rachel held Shira after lighting the candles. The soft glow of the flames played off her daughter’s face. It was the day of rest and of peace, the day when all woes were meant to cease, the day that Rachel had not truly had for more than six weeks.
At each step, Rachel had not been sure whether she would find the strength she needed to endure, and the courage to question. Silently, she again thanked God for creating all human beings with such remarkable reservoirs of resilience. She thought how the Sabbath was the time when these reservoirs were refilled. She prayed that during this first Sabbath after 9/11 her country would find the strength and courage to defend itself and to care, with a full heart, for the families who had lost loved ones.”
As most readers know, not that many people really died in September 11th. A little under 3,000, which is the world death toll from all causes every half hour (h/t to Vladimir for the correction) .So don’t just sit there caring about some tragedy that’s already occurred, work to stop the tragedies that are occurring constantly all over our planet, and the extremely large disasters that have a very good chance of happening, in this century. An existential disaster would be equivalent to more than two million 9/11 events, in terms of human death. If you feel sorrow for those we have lost, use that to save all those we will lose.
In my research on existential disasters in general, I also read “Never Saw It Coming.” This book was one of the most foolish books I’ve ever read. Karen Cerulo takes the observation that there is a cultural asymmetry in focusing more on the good than the bad, and then applies this perspective far more widely than appropriate. She often ignores contradictory evidence and any concern for the actual objectives at hand; I get the impression she had an alright idea and just really wanted it to be a great idea. It’s a kind of comic example of confirmation bias. There are a few tidbits and points that are worthwhile, but almost nothing applicable to existential risk.
There was a good quotation in there though, which relates to the tendency of people to apply a lot more effort to mourning than to saving lives.
“People who are in decision-making positions are not mentally preconditioned to think in terms of what happened. So that’s what I mean about a failure of imagination. The evidence comes in, but your mental reactions are not geared to thinking in these kinds of terms. When a guy calls from a flight school and says they could take a 747 with fuel and plow it into a building and that’s a bomb, you hear it but you say, “Ah, that’s a wacko idea.” You don’t say, “Holy Jesus, that’s what we’ve got to worry about.”…[You] fail to imagine what the danger is. [You] fail to understand the world we live in and the nature of the enemy.”   -Journalist Hedrick Smith

September 15th, 2009
With human history stretching back a few thousand years, there’s been quite a few exceptional people. Or maybe just fairly regular people who’ve done exceptional things, and that makes us consider them exceptional. Regardless, whatever you might find admirable, there have been people who’ve displayed those traits to an extraordinary degree. For most of us, I’m talking about courage, compassion, wisdom, tenacity, etc. What causes us to look up to a person – or a group – even more, is when they were able to bring about lasting change. People who improved the world around them, often times being part of the reason our lives are as good as they are. Maybe it’s the leaders of the civil rights movements, Abraham Lincoln, the authors of the Declaration of Independence, or the signers of the Magna Carta. It could be the founders of the environmental movement, those who have intelligently campaigned for better working conditions in the US and elsewhere, or diplomats who have devoted their lives to improving human rights. It could be Marie Curie, Davinci, or Pythagoras. It could be more personal heroes, such as parents, a teacher, or hard-as-nails ancestors upon whom our existence depended.
Whoever they are, whoever you might look up and whatever great works you might be thankful for, practically none of that survives an existential disaster. It matters a little, sure, that we and others have benefited from their efforts for at least a few years. And just maybe those accomplishments will keep doing good after existential disaster, like giving a permanently hamstrung humanity on a blasted earth some better form of government, as they appreciate what literature of ours survived. Perhaps some superintelligence carries a little of their values or work with it into the stars, after we’ve all been turned into computronium, and maybe that makes it just slightly easier to take. But as an acceptable approximation, all the good that has ever been done on this Earth won’t really mean crap if our planet becomes a roiling mass of replicationg nanobots or inert nano-smiles.
There have been thousands if not millions who have even died to protect a worthy ideal or leave a better world for future people, and the continued value of their efforts requires us to protect what they gained. If we fail to ensure a meaningful future, then we also fail to ensure a meaningful past, and the sum of all human sacrifices will mean almost nothing. The mantle of human history – perhaps inconveniently, perhaps surprisingly – falls on us.