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Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

This is dark.

I will never understand how so many educated people have such an anti-humanist view of the world.

Humans are awesome, intelligence is awesome. More humans means more amazing things. We are capable as a species of incredible things, and we have the ability to save our planet as well as continuing to grow. We cannot outgrow this planet and colonize other worlds, we cannot solve climate change, nuclear fusion, quantum computers, the great questions of physics without MORE smart people.

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> Humans are awesome,

Some humans are awesome. Other humans not so much.

> intelligence is awesome.

It is indeed, but intelligence is pretty unevenly distributed among humans.

> More humans means more amazing things.

It also means more stress on the planet's ecosystems. There are awesome things on earth besides humans, and one of the problems with humans is that too few of us seem to understand this.

> we have the ability to save our planet

In theory. The jury is very much out on whether we can actually do it. Personally, given what has been done to address climate change so far, I'll give long odds against.

> We cannot outgrow this planet and colonize other worlds

And who says that these are good things? If we can't even manage to bring this planet to a sustainable steady-state what makes you think we'll have better luck elsewhere?

> without MORE smart people.

More smart people is not the same thing as more people.

There's so much to unpack here, I'd love to have a longer form discussion in a place where we won't run out of thread depth, but I can't dig into all of the points in this format.

This all gets very philosophical, but seriously, optimism is much better than pessimism here.

> There are awesome things on earth besides humans

Like what? Nature is cool, we shouldn't destroy it, but nothing else is truly sentient on this planet besides us. Nothing else on this planet can ponder and understand the world like we can, this is a good thing that the universe should have more of. A meteor (like the one that killed the dinosaurs) could hit this planet at any time, in fact it's pretty likely that it will happen again. And on a long enough timeline, the sun will die and ALL life and ALL nature will die. In the interim what should we do? Should we just sit around on this planet and wait it out trying to preserve things the way they were when humans first evolved? What's the point?

I prefer to take the humanist approach, I like to think that humans and intelligence will make an incredibly cool, adventure-filled future for the universe and that we can and will do great things with more people.

> nothing else is truly sentient on this planet besides us

This is definitionally wrong. Sentient merely means "having sensations" or even the weaker having "senses". Perhaps you mean "sapient", with reasoning, self-knowledge, and an "internal life".

This too would be wrong, but not as obviously so. When we actually try to look and measure other animals fairly, we generally find that in measures of cognitive capability, there are animals that are not that different from humans. Many animals pass the mirror test. There are birds with complex vocal languages. Both apes and birds have been recorded spreading adaptions in food preparation within a cohort and down generations (the two astounding cases are dealing with the toxic backs of cane-toads in Australia -- learning to flip them over and only eat through the stomach (corvids) and picking them up and washing them (ibises)).

You also have the opposite problem, where things we think we're good at, even ones some would say define us as a species, are actually pretty poorly done by many of us. GPT-2, which is clearly not sapient, and only capable of writing a terrible, meandering essay, still does better than many high-school students, or even college students. And we now have much better examples, that still clearly aren't sapient.

> Perhaps you mean "sapient"

Yes, this is what I meant. What I really meant to say was "nothing else is truly sentient on this planet in the same way that humans are."

And to further elaborate what I'm really trying to get at is what Carl Sagan said "we are a way for the cosmos to know itself". No other creature is capable of it in the same way we are.

Yes I understand that consciousness is a continuum and that some species are more sentient than others (humans are obviously the furthest along this continuum though I would say).

Obviously I am biased since I am a human, but I really do think that the human ability internally monologue, to reason about our own thoughts, build complicated mental models and make decisions about them, is unique in the animal kingdom, possibly the universe depending on your parameters to the drake equation.

> nothing else is truly sentient on this planet besides us.

Your optimism is one thing, but this human supremacist stuff is just wrong. Do you think humans are a separate form of life,evolutionarily distinct from the animal kingdom or something?

There's clearly a qualitative difference between humans and our closest relatives. There's some axis on which humans are an outlier for life on earth. I mean, we're not worried about any other animal rising up and taking over, for one.

The US isn't worried about some uncontacted hunter-gatherer tribe rising up to wipe it out either. That doesn't mean they are lesser beings.

> I'd love to have a longer form discussion in a place where we won't run out of thread depth

You could leave a comment on my blog. Or write a guest post. Here are some possible attachment points:

http://blog.rongarret.info/2022/11/ron-descends-from-mountai...

https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/06/on-morality-of-kitten-to...

Or if none of those are suitable I could write up something new but that will take a few days.

> I like to think that humans and intelligence will make an incredibly cool, adventure-filled future for the universe

I like to think that too. But the evidence is strongly against it.

> nothing else is truly sentient

WRONG

Except you only need to look at a large number of countries with high populations (and often those with high fertility rates) and see little correlation with ability to achieve what you call "amazing things". A billion people with good access to necessary resources is going to achieve more than 10 billion living in poverty because we've largely trashed our planet's ability to support us.

A counterpoint: some of the biggest and best advances in the developed world occurred during or after a time of high fertility. The boomer generation is a good example. I'm not a boomer (I'm < 30), they get a lot of hate, but that generation basically invented the entirety of the modern world, without which we wouldn't even have the tools to understand climate change. If you want to achieve great things you need people to exist and do the work.

Examples of high fertility rates combined with poverty are often correlated with dictatorships and corruption, in my opinion they are cultural.

Some People just dont like other people because they think other people dont like them because they dont like themselfs. Yes you read that right.

Psychologiy is a fidgedty beast and in a socicety that is fed by automated media bots and optimized for the "most bang for the buck".

While we long for educated and helpfull people, we have only recently actually began to accept nerds.

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