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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

This is sort of a selfish viewpoint to take, is it not? I mean I don't necessarily disagree with you, just... the reasoning seems strange to me.

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It’s ultimately a humanist set of values that lead to that conclusion. If we value human happiness we should try to make as much of that as possible.

Sure, but more lives doesn't mean a net increase in happiness. A trillion people who live in the edge of starvation are probably less happy overall than a few billion who are well fed.

I mean, what's the point if being a humanist of you don't care about the human?

There's a whole philosophical discourse about this very topic[1] and I'm not well read enough on the topic to adequately hash out the "repugnant conclusion".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox

Except starvation has gone down and quality of life has gone up for the large majority of the human population. Where are you coming from with "a trillion people who live in the edge of starvation"? Some assumed doomsday situation?

Not to be a buzz kill but things have been getting better.

> Not to be a buzz kill but things have been getting better.

Past performance does not guarantee future results. In fact, what this article is saying is that mathematically, our future results are practically guaranteed to be worse than they have been in the past. I don't find your comment at all persuasive because you have not even attempted to grapple with this issue presented in the article.

No, but past performance does provide evidence, and in the outside view, "no really, this really is the time where we're growing too much and are gonna collapse" has not been true yet. Will it happen eventually? It has to. Will this be the one? Probably not. Are we close to the limits where it'll actually occur? Probably not.

Did... did you read the article you're commenting on?

Honestly I only care about the happiness of humans that actually exist. The theoretical happiness of humans that were never born concerns me not even a little.

Is that a reasonable conclusion? Is it better to have a population of 8 billion or a population of 8 trillion where on average everyone is 1/1000 as happy? Is happiness even something where it makes more sense to measure a total rather than an average? If we value high speed in the 100m sprint, should we add more runners to ensure a higher total speed?

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