Lesson from the Thailand cave rescue.
It’s so easy to be seduced by one extreme or another.
Extremes make life simple and manageable. Reality is never simple and barely manageable. Complexity is part of reality and the best a scientist can do is make approximations. Analyze long term trends, estimate the strength of all major forces affecting the outcome and make predictions based on the calculated probability of different scenarios playing out. And the scientist is still only guessing. Remember Chaos Theory that documents the unexpected effect of a butterfly’s wings flapping in the Amazon jungle in Brazil?
I have been making blog posts that may appear one-sided, even extreme, about all the bad things that have been happening lately in the world. And then the Thai cave rescue event came to light and mesmerized us all with human compassion, courage and intelligent problem solving at its best.
Does that invalidate everything I had written before?
Sadly, not at all.
What I wrote in the first paragraph still holds.
“About 29,000 children under the age of five – 21 each minute – die every day in the world, mainly from preventable causes.”
During the two weeks of the rescue of those trapped boys, roughly half a million children perished due to the general lack of compassion and intelligent problem solving on this planet.
Were they also “Children of the World” as enthusiastic reporters called the 12 rescued kids in Thailand?
I know, this blog is a cold shower on our smug self-congratulation over a really spectacular achievement. However, it was a brief battle in the war of survival of our species that we are losing. I am still a misanthrope.
Extremes make life simple and manageable. Reality is never simple and barely manageable. Complexity is part of reality and the best a scientist can do is make approximations. Analyze long term trends, estimate the strength of all major forces affecting the outcome and make predictions based on the calculated probability of different scenarios playing out. And the scientist is still only guessing. Remember Chaos Theory that documents the unexpected effect of a butterfly’s wings flapping in the Amazon jungle in Brazil?
I have been making blog posts that may appear one-sided, even extreme, about all the bad things that have been happening lately in the world. And then the Thai cave rescue event came to light and mesmerized us all with human compassion, courage and intelligent problem solving at its best.
Does that invalidate everything I had written before?
Sadly, not at all.
What I wrote in the first paragraph still holds.
“About 29,000 children under the age of five – 21 each minute – die every day in the world, mainly from preventable causes.”
During the two weeks of the rescue of those trapped boys, roughly half a million children perished due to the general lack of compassion and intelligent problem solving on this planet.
Were they also “Children of the World” as enthusiastic reporters called the 12 rescued kids in Thailand?
I know, this blog is a cold shower on our smug self-congratulation over a really spectacular achievement. However, it was a brief battle in the war of survival of our species that we are losing. I am still a misanthrope.
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