A million dead people, sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension, don’t matter. It’s a funny piece of human psychology. Deaths years ago or years in the future, or in Africa or wherever. Just don’t matter to most people. Goes double when they are “other”.

“sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension” is where that falls apart, though. One million dead within the US alone means a lot of people were touched by COVID death.

Aren’t they not at all far from us, in any dimension whatsoever, except that they are not literally us?

99% of them are far from you physically. If you weren’t personally affected it probably doesn’t matter to you.

I was unlucky and lost 3 grandparents between my wife and I. Matters more to me probably.

I doubt that they're disproportionately far from my physically.

I am really aiming for density here. I don’t think it’s weird (or debatable) that humans don’t care as much about other humans that are far away. They care about ones that are closer.

The thing is lack of density was sufficient to trigger this lack of care. Kind of interesting.

This is not the sort of calculation businesses seem willing to make. It can be hard to get an extra stick of RAM or a copy of JetBrains.