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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

We should always value humans over other species, and if you disagree you're an enemy of our species.

We don’t, however, have any idea how to keep humans alive after killing of all the other species. We appear to be totally reliant on some part of the natural world continuing to work, and we don’t know what part of it is required. Prudence suggests we be cautious about how much of it we decide to kill off.

You can value humans over other species without assigning a nil value to the latter

What does that mean concretely?

Would you have something like an exchange rate where 2000 chicken lives = 1 human life?

More like "if all the bugs die because we use too many pesticides, the systems that support life on this planet will collapse."

Which is exactly how someone caring only about human lives would reason.

> What does that mean concretely?

E.g. you value your spouse more than you value a random other human. It doesn't mean you don't value the other human.

You can assign a value to both that says we should not harm these things.

Valuing humans over other species at all costs leads to humans collapsing our environment and thus harming humans.

Only if you apply the idea in a stupid and shortsighted way.

I advocate for doing it smartly.

It's a bit exhausting to have to point out something so obvious.

Well then you come back around to valuing nature imo

We should always value our family and friends over others, or else you are an enemy of family and friends. Also race, religious and ethnic group...

What's your point?

What if we found a living Neanderthal village. They’re taking up space that an equivalent human village could, should we get rid of them?

I mean, I'd say Neanderthals are humans. I'm 2.x% Neanderthal myself, according to my DNA vendor.

If we're talking about other sentient and moral species, those are admittedly hard questions.

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