Easy is debatable, unless you have a huge fleet of helicopters (or maybe drones, because hey, it's the 21st century for some parts of the world). I've been to Mongolia, the vast emptiness is amazing, the article talks about roads but most of it is unpaved dirt track in the steppe. Now imagine a thick layer of snow covering that...

Yeah it's tough for folks to understand the sheer vastness of a place like Mongolia. Combined with a lack of infrastructure, it's still a really unforgiving area.

When I was in Mongolia, I met a group of American peacecorps who helped nomads with planning for winter, and taught them how to better manage their resources to avoid this exact scenario. As soon as they left, the locals reverted back to their old way of doing things.

Perhaps there was more to it, but as told — that’s a story of incredible hubris! Truly amazing to fly across the world to tell Mongolians how to live on the steppe.

It sounds like the Mongolian hosts showed remarkable courtesy by accommodating their guests' odd preferences during the visit.

I would imagine this was a joint venture between the Mongolian and American governments, but you’re right.

While I get where you're coming from, it's not unheard of cultures finding a local maxima that they are unwilling to leave. I guess it's hard to judge from the outside?

Peace Corps is especially notorious for sending inexperienced agriculture volunteers who's expertise is volunteering 2 months at a WWOOF organic farm, so I would not be surprised if they were just clueless new grads thinking they were saving the world.

Isn’t it hubris to think that someone who flew across the world to try to help you isn’t worth listening to?

And afterall it’s the Mongolians who might starve. Any port in a storm.

Depends on when they showed up. The helpful Americans, that is, in relation to the killer winter.

Judging from a lot of HN discussions so, Americans should really understand the rwluctance of anyone to listen to people from other countries explaining how things should be done. Exihibit A through Z: every single discussion about health care or city planning. Or gun control.

But we're exceptional - they would never work here because there's no way we could manage those things without screwing it up.

The Mongolians have been thriving in the steppes for thousands of years.

Isn’t it hubris to think that someone who flew across the world to try to help you isn’t worth listening to?

Depends on who is that that flew across the world and how much have they developed a trusted relationship with me..

Why should anyone trust every busybody's advice? If the volunteers have put their money and started a herd and proved that their herd is better managed, then it is possible to get others to follow. Giving management advice without doing it yourself is just bullshit.

Have you ever worked with consultants.

Anyone with the money can fly across the world to try to help. That doesn't make the help automatically useful.

Yeah sharing knowledge for free is definitely hubris. For sure.

Sure it is, if you have no idea if your knowledge is actully usefull and you push it anyway.

Just imagine how you feel if someone, say a consultant or a agile master, shows up at your work and tells how to do your job without having any experience with it, or the environment you are doing it for. There are even multiple threads on HN every week accusing those consultants of hubris in various ways.

Presumably they didn't just fly in and wing it, and it's kind of a given that any solutions to this problem will be different to the status quo.

The only thing that shows more hubris than telling foreigners how to live is foreigners dying en masse because they refuse to change their way of life - see, America on cars or gun control.

Correct, it definitely can be if it’s unsolicited advice and/or if the “knowledge” is low quality, incomplete, difficult to apply, or just ignorant of Chesterton’s Fence.

Let me drop by your workplace and tell you how to do your job. And call you ungrateful when you don't listen to me. I mean, I have no idea what you do for a living and you have no reason to believe I have some special expertise you lack. But hey, free knowledge right?

I'm making the assumption that whoever is sharing the knowledge has valuable knowledge. Offering value for free is the definition of benevolence.

Yep, snooty early 20-somethings flying halfway across the world to teach people with hundreds years of experience.

For sure that's not just virtue signaling and youthful delusion. For sure.

I'm making the assumption that whoever is sharing the knowledge has valuable knowledge. Offering value for free is the definition of benevolence.

I don't know the case, so yeah if it was just people without knowledge coming in and forcing it on them... ok.

There was TED Talk from person who tried to teach some African people to grow tomatoes. When tomatoes were almost-reap there were a large herd of hippos and eat all tomatoes, completely, fruits and foliage.

At least, this person (sorry, I can not recall name) acknowledge, that it was naive and hubris!

UPDATE: I was not first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39640882 need to read whole thread before answering!

As others pointed out already, Mongols are very polite and friendly to visitors. Even people who want to tell them how to live in their own steppes.

"Want to tell how to live" - what a bullshit way to read the GP comment. People starved, others tried to help them not to starve. They didn't "tell them how to live". If Mongols want to live like before and starve, sure, that's their privilege, but then I'd say everyone else has done their part. It's not the job of the world to help someone who wants to suffer.

No idea when OPs story happened, but from his use of "help prepare for winter", I concluded it was before the current disaster. Pretty hard to prepare for something when you are right in the middle of it.

And yes, that is hubris.

Also, your comment shows are very deep and troubling lack of empathy. On top of quite a large amount of ignorance.

All this depends on whether the advice was actually objectively good advice or not. Is it hubris to give someone information you think may help them? This all hinges on whether or not they decided not to take the advice because it was crap advice or because they were set in their ways too much to make use of it.

Before you give advice, you ask questions and build the necessary basis that allows you to adopt your knowledge to the particular use case. If you do not do that, you fail. You even fail with good ideas, because you do not get buy in from the people.

So yes, hubris is a rather good word for that kind of behaviour.

Sure, asking questions and building rapport helps... and we have no idea if they did that or not. We don't know how they came about giving their advice to those particular people, we don't know what that advice was, and we don't know why they refused to heed it.

Even if I had the urge to judge them on whether or not they were showing hubris in that situation, I would have to conclude I don't have enough information to do so.

I think change is gradual not sudden. It tends to be incremental and also tends to be specific to one area. Often if you are involved in the change you don't notice it as much. My grandmother passed over 20 years ago. As a result of her passing away I didn't go to her village for close on 15 years. When I did go the changes I noticed were astonishing to me. 15 years back most of the houses were mud huts. Now most are brick building with mud huts being the exception. It took a while.

Anyone who spends time spreading new and improved ways of doing things I urge you to firstly continue to do so and to also realise change is gradual. Humans

That makes me think of this excellent TED talk: https://youtu.be/chXsLtHqfdM?si=kTaxu3KCBEYYadGA

(Spoiler) The TL;DW The presenter participated in a humanitarian group to establish an agricultural project in an African community. The effort was a disaster - hippos emerge from a river and devoured all of the produce. The presenter shares his insights about how to actually help locals by asking questions instead of telling them what to do.

I also met some nz government workers teaching ppl how to farm. They said most Mongolians weren’t interested in working with the dirt. Understandable given their long long history as nomads.

> They said most Mongolians weren’t interested in working with the dirt.

What a strange statement. Most people in most countries aren’t interested in “working with the dirt” as their full time occupation. Are they supposed to be interested in working with dirt more than other countries for some reason, and not aim for science, tech, education, finance, arts, etc? I just looked it up, and Mongolia’s economy is around 35% mining and agriculture, with 10% of their total GDP from agriculture, which is quite a bit higher than New Zealand, so their statement seems especially ironic. The US and European economies have an even lower fraction of mining and agriculture, and aspire to get away from manual labor, especially involving dirt.

Also don’t forget it’s much easier to grow things in NZ than Mongolia: “the high altitude, extreme fluctuation in temperature, long winters, and low precipitation provides limited potential for agricultural development. The growing season is only 95 – 110 days. Because of Mongolia's harsh climate, it is unsuited to most cultivation.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolia#Agriculture

"Agriculture" as a category includes livestock and herding, which make up something like 80% of the Mongolian agricultural industry.

Yeah, correct, because it makes more economic sense to herd than farm, for reasons you and I have both given. It doesn’t make sense nor help anything for foreigners to waltz in and proclaim Mongolians aren’t interested, right?

> 10% of their total GDP from agriculture, which is quite a bit higher than New Zealand

Meat was 11% of NZ export income: a huge amount more than the 1.5% for Mongolia[1]. GDP is weird, and comparing sectors or countries is hard. Comparing meat since that's the topic.

> long winters, and low precipitation provides limited potential for agricultural development. it is unsuited to most cultivation

A better comparison is between the South Island of New Zealand and Mongolia. South Island latitude 41S to 47S. Mongolia latitude 41N to 50N. The South Island has "high-country farms" but New Zealand farming is far different from Mongolia where the country's altitude is mostly between say 800m and 1600m (along with continental weather).

[1] Data: Mongolia Exports of meat and edible meat offal was US$19.73 Million during 2021, Mongolia of total Exports 1324.80. New Zealand had NZD77.2 billion exports, with NZD8.6 billion exports for meat and offal.

New Zealanders should never be insulting their hosts. (Edit: removed inane opinion).

That’s all fair, I’d delete my comment if I could.

> Dissecting a second-hand sentence is pointless. Without more context, we can't know what they meant or what they were trying to communicate or the value of their opinion.

Totally agree. Sharing the second-hand sentence out of context also makes little sense, no? That was the only point I intended to make, and I should have left out the sloppy economic comparison.

All good: your comment got me to dig into some economic numbers - worthwhile for me or I wouldn't have bothered trying.

More importantly it reminded me that comparing group statistics is really hard!

Mongolia is an incredibly shitty place to farm outside a couple of valleys with nice microclimates. There's very little infrastructure for the equipment and resources, and any farmers would be competing with Chinese farmers that don't have these constraints and can hit vastly lower price points. Farming is a difficult life in the best of situations, but not doing it in Mongolia is simply common sense.

The baseline international volunteers need to demonstrate is that they provided benefit higher than just giving away the cost of their flights to get there.

IE: American volunteer groups going to poor countries to build them schools.

They can easily ask China and Russia (and realistically only those two can help massively). Likely they are too prideful tho

Can you elaborate? Because as it stands the US throws away 30-40 percent of its own food supply[1].

When Russia supplied free grain to Africa, because they couldn't sell it due to sanctions the West complained that accepting free grain would be "too dangerous a price to pay"[2]

[1] https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-23/russia-in...

How generous of them

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-russian-stolen-grain...

https://web.archive.org/web/20220627050935/https://www.bbc.c...

Maybe read up where the Ukraine grain was destined to begin with[1].

It's really sad that over the last two years the once serious bloomberg became another mouthpiece of war propaganda.

[1] https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/wheat/reporte...

Shipping free grain to places with food security problems actually does make the problem worse, because it bankrupts local farmers. It's fine in an emergency, but in general it's better to subsidize local farmers than to send food.

Yeah, of course. All famines and food shortages happen because the people faced with a shortage are to proud to ask for help... Rihjt...

Any other deep thoughts you want to share?

Sure, but they can also easily ask anyone. I don't know why it makes sense to shrug off that responsibility onto some nationalist bullshit.

The problem here is not simply food security, but the fact is that herds represented the capital those rural mongolian held, and now it's gone.

Life is not a video game

Source?