Especially in case of climate change, where consequences come relatively slowly.
Context: I read developed countries are helping but they do not have a sense of urgency as it is happening far away. In other words
"out of sight, out of mind".
Humans mostly agree on what constituts suffering and pain while there are many definitions of happiness.
I am thinking that in very simplified terms, emotions are "weights" to data in our neurophysiology. Similarly as nods in neural network have weights to them.
I feel a stronger connection to people I personally know and whom I can experience with my physical senses. This feeling of connection in my experience grows strong the more my values and values of other people are aligned and the more time we spend together, especially if situations are diverse and optimally challenging (we experience state of flow together or in a timely manner).
I find it difficulty to truly empathize with people with whom I have no or rare contact in real life. The challenges of their struggle are soon just a data point in my consciousness with no important emotional weight attached to it.
Where as if I am connected to my local community these weights attached to data are much bigger and they correspond to me much more. Even more so if something is going on with my friends or family, then the emotional "weight" on that data is even bigger
This means I dedicate more of my energy, time and resources to my local community, which is probably optimal.
I also vaguely remember reading Foundations where in the end Isaac Asimov character thinks that telepathy is important also because is provides with a greater *feeling* (emotional weights in my sense) of connection between members who share this connection and can share feeling even if physically farther apart.
Unless we have case of trekonomics with unlimited clean energy and even in that case there are limited resurces we would need to share if we would like to prevent suffering and pain for a vast majority of people living on Earth.
HN what are you thoughts on this?
It is very difficult for example to convince a large part of the world to abandon cheap energy sources or industrialization because the economies that used it to industrialize their economies say it's bad, and all the alternatives are too expensive or inaccessible to grow their economies at the same rate. If you listen to what the leaders of these countries say publicly, it's not that they don't want cheap and clean energy or to fight climate change. It's that they don't want to abandon their nations' economic growth for the sake of it, particularly when it's led by states that have made a policy of exploiting them in the not-too-distant past.
The problem to solve isn't the lack of empathy or resource sharing from the rich former colonizers. We have enormous amounts of that. What we need are evidence based approaches combined with collaboration led by developing nations' governments and people based on what they say they need. The last part is more important than anything we can do in our governments or societies, because we have no credibility.
Basically don't tell or give people what you think they need. Ask them and listen.