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Comment by mindfulplay | Hacker News Reader

I have often wondered about this aspect of lifespan. Octopuses are amazing.

Perhaps their relatively short lifespan and lifecycle after mating is somehow correlated with them being around for 500+ million years. Somehow I find that more fascinating.

I feel like humans are inherently lower on this scale: we definitely live longer but I wonder as a species if we would be better off with shorter lifespan (and life cycle) like octopuses that helps the entire human species survive (peacefully?) as opposed to an optimization around single individual lifespan.

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That seems rather bleak and somewhat Malthusian. I'm further perplexed by the idea that anti-individualism or some sort of collectivism would be "better for us". Historically, collectivist thinking hasn't been positive for anyone who's interests fall outside of the narrow interests of those in power.

> Historically, collectivist thinking hasn't been positive for anyone who's interests fall outside of the narrow interests of those in power.

Doesn't that really depend on your choice of examples? I could for example point to the Montreal protocol as a highly successful example of collectivist thinking that has been hugely positive for basically everyone, perhaps outside of a narrow few in the refrigerants industry.

The Montreal protocol is really narrow, and addresses the commons in a way that benefits everyone everywhere in a narrow and specific way (reduced ozone depletion), while only requiring a switch to a slightly more expensive/less efficient replacements for CFC and HFCs.

I'm clearly not arguing against environmental protection. Im arguing against the nebulous idea of "the good of society (species as in the grandparent post)" vs protection of individual rights.

There are degrees of collectivism and collective action though.

The mere fact we roughly agree (via cultural norms moreso than law) to more or less respect a core set of individual rights is itself a collective act. We don't live in Hobbsian war-of-all after all.

And pretty much every human society at this point has governments that tax in order to provide services for the "good of society" (granted with many different degrees of success).

I still wouldn't want to live in a fascist or soviet style state though, if that is your point. Fully subsuming the will of the individual to the goals of the state is personally abhorrent to me and my values, but I can certainly imagine other value-sets where a more collectivists society is better able to achieve those values.

And yet firms collect individuals together to extract the surplus profit from them for those in power.

Definitely collectivism is not good for anyone not following the goals of the collective. The idea that collectivism is "better for us" is a collective point of view, that doing something optimal for the most of us is better than doing something suboptimal for all of us. Collective thinking has many positive and negative examples, often both in the same example. One with a high positive side is the rise from devastation of post-Korean War South Korea to the powerhouse it is today in about 50 years, and this considering that South Korea has very few natural resources, so the only resource they can count on was manpower.

Human life spans are driven by the fact that newborn humans need the support of their parents to survive until they reach sexual maturity. So there is selective pressure on humans to live just long enough to see their grandchildren born and not much longer. Octopi don't have that constraint. They just need to reproduce, then they're done.

Actually not. Octopuses (female) breed their young for months without eating and then die off. Seems like they have perfected this system over millenia via evolution?

Humans being of the few animals that go through menopause is strong evidence that grandmothers contribute to the survival of their grandchildren.

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