Sam Harris

And I'll give you the clear example of this, which is

We find stories with a single identifiable protagonist who we can effortlessly empathize with far more compelling than data, right?

So if I tell you, this is the classic case of the little girl who falls down a well,

This is somebody's daughter.

You see the parents distraught on television.

You hear her cries from the bottom of the well.

The whole country stops.

I mean, there was an example of this 20, 25 years ago, I think, where it was just wall to wall on CNN.

This is just the perfect use of CNN.

It was 72 hours or whatever it was of continuous coverage of just extracting this girl from a well.

So we effortlessly pay attention to that.

We care about it.

We will donate money toward it.

I mean, it's just, it marshals 100% of our compassion and altruistic impulse.

Whereas if you hear that there's a genocide raging in some country you've never been to and never intend to go to, the numbers don't make a dent.

And we find...

the story boring, right?

And we'll change the channel in the face of a genocide, right?

It doesn't matter.

And it literally, perversely, it could be 500,000 little girls have fallen down wells in that country and we still don't care, right?