Under the radar

Yesterday evening I was driving a car to the airport where I was supposed to pick up @laputis' brother and his colleague returning home from Microsurgery congress in Berlin, Germany. On my way there I was listening to the podcast "Love Your Work" where David Kadavy interviewed Rob Wiblin, the director of research at "80000 hours".

They were talking, among other things, about humanity's effort to prevent or fight threatening events for future generations.

The problem is that some areas get massive attention and funding while others don't.

The best way to do this is to focus on the areas that require a lot of energy and attention but often fly under the radar of the public. This is because focusing on the area that is already heavily researched and funded will give diminishing returns.

It's sort of similar for athletes, pro swimmers who train all day long only to be able to swim a tenth of the second faster. They already swim very fast and no matter how much work they put in, the result will be just a little bit faster.

So Rob Wiblin says it turns out that not every effort to fight climate change would give great results. Because this area already gets lots and lots of attention - billions of people are affected by the problem, millions are talking about it and thousands are doing something about it.

For a person or organization who would like to contribute, it's better to find an area that gets attention from a few or a 100 people.

By the way, did you know that used plastic straws in some countries end up in the noses of sea turtles? When I heard about this on the podcast yesterday, I thought it's so terrible. We all know about the plastic bags in the oceans, right? But not so much about plastic straws and the damage they do to the wildlife.

But the best way to fight this problem is not to ban plastic straws altogether but to send a few waste managment specialists to coutries like India, Vietman, Indonesia and some others and to see what can be done that garbage wouldn't be throught to the rivers. Because if people are throwing the garbing anywhere, then it might end up through waterways in the ocean and consequently in the noses of turtles.

But if garbage would be put into waste baskets or containers they would end up in a special safe place.

It was also interesting to hear how efforts to help stray animals, like dogs are not necessarily giving the best result precisely because so much attention is already in this area. Instead, farming animals get much less attention and their living conditions are just terrible (think of caged chickens who cannot even turn around in their cages because they are so many of them).

David Kadavy and Rob Wiblin talked for 2.5 hours, it's a massive podcast conversation (and I still have some 20 minutes left to listen) but the last thing that struck me was this idea how random our world actually is.

Imagine a town in which all the cars stop for a couple of seconds. And then start moving again. No big deal, right? People will then continue about their day as usual. But these couple of moments are enough to completely change the course of action of many many people because there are so many variables involved.

Even during sex, if a different spermatozoid fertilized the egg, and this would happen in a wide enough area of population, over time we would end up with completely different people walking the earth.

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