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Comment by Depurator | Hacker News Reader

This is a good example of a very narrow human centric view that captures why its bad to try to maximize for particular made up metrics, such as human utility. It also a wonderfully hare brained view of technolocial innovation that disregards the dark sides, material input, or externalities at all.

Is this person an economist or something?

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I think they are quite upfront about their values, and I suspect they would quite likely be OK with being labelled human-centric, as would I!

Certainly, it was just more of a general criticism toward such a view, as leading to long term degradation of the world. I totally get how humans would always protitize humanity first, but in the long term we have some issues such as overfishing, global warming, biodiversity loss etc. as a result. But the esiest would of course to not belive in thos issues, and have cool toys

What you described is still human centric. Nature has survived several extinction level events and I’m sure it will survive more.

If humanity changes the current environment enough, then it will no longer be the once ideal environment to that continues to sustain humanity indefinitely.

Going on a tangent, a lot of environmentalists have a marketing problem.

Nature will die with 100% certainty. That is a verified fact due to the coming life-cycle changes of our sun. Nothing will survive that.

Only humans have a chance to save "nature" by bringing life along to the stars. Not sure if we will be able to pull it off, but I see no other option.

Sure! On the other hand, if we kill ourselves off before that happens, for example by making the planet unlivable for humans, then that chance is also gone. Getting to that level of technological advancement is a marathon, not a sprint.

So more humans is value neutral but more earth-like planets is value positive? Your standards seem bizarre. Can you please elaborate?

As i replied to the sibling comment, coming from another species perspective it would be reasonable to assume that a world optimized to fulfill the need of another species, such as humans would be seen as negative. It's not like they can enact their discontent, so i would argue we have to account for other species as well when we remodel the natural world.

Evolutionary adaptation takes a while, so its not nice to change things fast.

Those that can adapt quickly will be quite happy about it.

So who gets to set the metric?

You can't even define "degradation" without humans around. The planet itself doesn't care, nor does the fish.

Extending human empathy to non-human processes is peak anthropocentrism.

I think you can define degradation. I can make objective claims that less biodiversity is worse than more biodiversity and use it to measure degradation without humans around. I can measure this degradation in planets without humans or model out the degradation in a future where humans are extinct, and call certain situations objectively worse than others under that yardstick.

Maybe I misunderstood because it seems you're claiming if there's no humans around it's impossible to model any phenomena, but we possess abstract thought to make up those situations and define things like degradation in the absence of humans.

> I can make objective claims that less biodiversity is worse than more biodiversity and use it to measure degradation without humans around.

While the amount of biodiversity can be measured objectively, the notion of it being "good" is completely made up. You need humans to judge what's "good" and which means that for any "good" kind of future humans are essential and are more important than say biodiversity.

If biodiversity is good (and I say it is, but it’s a human judgement), then human civilization is also good, and for the same reason: it represents life, complexity, activity, and progress.

... sixth mass extinction??

You, a human, can define degradation. So your prerequisite to degradation measurement requires humans?

Or we can assume that the state of the world before humans was a state that we have deviated from though human agency, and it is reasonable to remedy some of that irreversible trajectory would be a good cause that some other intelligent species could undertake after we're gone.

The first known extinction event was caused by cyanobacteria that released vast amounts oxygen (highly toxic chemical) into the atmosphere. It killed most of the anaerobic life, clearly "deviating from the previous state of the world". The time has come to "remedy some of that irreversible trajectory".

The whole notion that the "current trajectory" is somehow objectively bad is ridiculous. It may be bad for humans though.

A human centric view is not unreasonable.

Sure. And neither is a non human centric view. However, both seem unreasonable to the other.

That's not what they're saying. They are saying that focusing strictly on utilitarianism can prove to be unreasonable.

As a human, I have a human-centric mindset. I don’t want to live in the forest with rain filling up my mud floor. I like nice things.

> As a human, I have a human-centric mindset. I don’t want to live in the forest with rain filling up my mud floor. I like nice things.

I think the whole discussion is about which amount of humans on this planet would maximize the probability of having nice things for each individual. Certainly it would be hard for you to have nice things when there is only a million humans on Earth, but probably even more so if there is a trillion of them around.

Hopefully with a trillion people around we'll figure out a good source of energy that'll deliver both prosperity on earth and interplanetary travel

There would be some significant tradeoffs necessary for maintaining a trillion people population on Earth no matter the energy cost. Even if you assume cheap and abundant cold fusion energy source, living in mcmansion and eating avocado toasts with wild salmon is likely out of the question.

I don't think it's the case. If you have truly free energy then transformation of matter in whatever you want it to be becomes a purely technological question.

And in any case, having spaceships and no avocado is much better than the inverse.

> I don't think it's the case. If you have truly free energy then transformation of matter in whatever you want it to be becomes a purely technological question.

Some purely technological problems are hard to solve. There is already a market for (very expensive) meat substitutes and they taste like crap. If you are talking about some sci-fi "replicator" tech that will just "synthesize" you and avocado, then I'm not sure how achievable that is in short or medium-term irrespective to energy prices.

> And in any case, having spaceships and no avocado is much better than the inverse.

Much better for whom? OP said they like "nice things". I would also prefer avocados to spaceships since I'm not that interested in space travel without FTL.

A trillion of humans is not short-term either

> Much better for whom? OP said they like "nice things". I would also prefer avocados to spaceships since I'm not that interested in space travel without FTL.

For humans and for avocados. The sun is doomed and so are they, unless we manage to scale our available energy by many orders of magnitude.

> There is already a market for (very expensive) meat substitutes and they taste like crap.

Impossible is pretty decent tasting for ground beef substitute, IMO. The pricing is currently not competitive or inline with its utility value, but I could see that changing much faster than any colonize-space or make earth pleasant for 12 billion people projects.

As long as there's coffee.

As a human I like nice things too. But increasing human population even more by decreasing animal diversity I see as a bigger threat to livability on earth.

This is reduction to absurdity which is pretty ignorant to original argument.

Looking at this,

> Instead, I’m going to argue that a larger population is better for every individual—that there are selfish reasons to want more humans.

I'd say yes, and that this person assumes we are all economists. The 'selfish' part also assumes that economy-boosting reasons for wanting more humans is what would make us indiidually happy

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