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Comment by fifnir | Hacker News Reader

> Survival is definitely valuable, by simply allowing you to produce value longer.

...can you please take a step back, read this again, and think about what it is that you're saying?

Economics are a tool to describe emergent behaviour in societies. “Value” is, in this context, just a word we use as a tool to model reality. We see reality as a river of efforts, and cause and effect relationships eddying up and down. We use words like “value” and “incentive” to try and label those existing flows. But reality doesn’t care about economics. It just is. We try to understand only so we can align our mental models with reality better, which then enables us to steer our society towards a more desirable stream, hopefully leading towards a more desirable outcome.

This is always implicit when speaking about economics. Don’t attach too much meaning to “value” , or “purpose” , or any of those models. They’re just describing a model of reality, not prescribing it.

TLDR: “value” in economics != “value” in Buddhism.

Why do you think you’re correct? When everyone learned that their shoes were made by slave labor, shoe companies made drastic changes away from using slave labor. People are generally aware of the externalities of their economic decisions, they just don’t often line up with the most vocal environmental voices.

I don't know. Can you ?

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