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I understand your point. But don't you think the wildlife are equally important? There are 7 BILLION people on earth... but there are just 5000 rhinos, for exa

I understand your point. But don't you think the wildlife are equally important? There are 7 BILLION people on earth... but there are just 5000 rhinos, for example. That's 1.5 MILLION people to a rhino. This is one of the most magnificent species to have ever walked earth - why shouldn't we prioritize preserving it over human comfort? Why do you value increase in living standards over a sentient species that all things considered, is a form of life just like humans?

pc86 11y ago
> But don't you think the wildlife are equally important? The implicit end of that sentence is "equally important to the hundreds of millions of Africans living there." And to that, emphatically no. People are more important. Full stop. I am no anti-environmental activist. I want to see renewable energy take over fossil fuels, I want to see conscientious business taking environmental factors into account at all steps of production. But given the 100% false dichotomy of "African development" or "animals" I am going to pick the one that helps one of the most impoverished, war-torn regions on the planet every time.
- anon4this1 11y ago
  Humans are just an exponentially increasing function which will generally grow to consume the resources available to them. Why do they deserve to be prioritised over the millions of other species on earth?
  - pc86 11y ago
    Given the choice between lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and offering huge economic opportunity to a stagnant global economy and some arbitrary (and disputed) danger to wildlife, development is the only choice. The snarky answer is probably something about how lions would not be setting up Human Preserves if the situations were reversed.
    - anon4this1 11y ago
      "lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty" Objectively, humanity most closely resembles a cancer. The more you feed it, the more it grows. It tramples everything in its path. The belief that somehow exponential economic growth is going to fix everything and everyone will lead happy middle class lives in some kind of harmony with nature is delusional. We are in the midst of the largest mass extinction event of all time. In developed places, the natural forests and wildlife are 90-95% gone. The only places where nature still truly thrives are in undeveloped regions - the rainforests of Papua New Guinea, the amazon, the plains of africa. As "development" accelerates in these places, they too will destroy nature in the name of the eternal quest for positive economic growth, attainment of first world healthcare, buying a car.
      - pc86 11y ago
        Then by all means, everyone who lives there can continue living in huts so that the trees aren't disturbed, right? This entire argument is insane.
        littletimmy 11y ago
        What's wrong with people living in huts? People can be at harmony with nature, there's no need to force them into buildings. There certainly is no indication that living in a brick house makes someone happier than living in a hut.
        anon4this1 11y ago
        In modern economic terms, subsistence living in small communities barely registers as existence at all. However it is the way most of humanity lived for most of history. And generally it seemed to be a satisfying way of life. We evolved to live in this way. We think of people living in situations of subsistence as being unbearably impoverished and disadvantaged now. We have no evidence that we are really any happier or more fulfilled than them. We have longer life expectancy, and we spend much of it isolated and lonely and sick.
  - RhodesianHunter 11y ago
    No we aren't. Birth rates slow to replacement levels or lower in first world countries. Look at Japan, or the US and Germany which are only growing due to immigration.
    - 100timesthis 11y ago
      He is referring about consumption, not birth rates.
  - ashwinaj 11y ago
    > Why do they deserve to be prioritised over the millions of other species on earth? Hmm...should save a human or an animal? Wow this sub thread is shocking. Let me throw in my obnoxious hat into the ring; why not get rid of useless/unproductive/racist/bigoted/terrorists/middle management people to save the animals? Even better, why don't I unilaterally decide who is important and who isn't just to save animals? Just....wow.
    - littletimmy 11y ago
      Is it the slippery slope you're worried about? Nobody is really talking about killing people in this thread. What is being said is that the unnecessary development of Africa will lead to a population explosion and vast increase in consumption of resources that will hurt animals. We should not be encouraging development, and should focus on curating the African wilderness.
      - douche 11y ago
        Who is this we? If people in Africa want to exploit their natural resources to develop and improve their lives, they should be free to do so. Everybody else has. It's a little hypocritical for Westerners who have already reaped the benefits and costs of development to pull the ladder up after themselves for the rest of the world. I'm not of the persuasion that colonialism was the worst thing ever since the start of time, but it is especially hypocritical and racist to say "Oh, sorry, we built some shoddy infrastructure, wrecked a lot of your traditional society, and used you to extract resources, now you should go back to living in grass huts and dying of treatable diseases to save the rhinos." If Africa can develop by skipping some of the shittier stages of agriculture->industry->post-industry evolution that we've experienced in the US, or Europe, or China, then that's a good thing.
        littletimmy 11y ago
        Maybe the Westerners who exploited these lands should pay reparations to Africa and fast-track their development past industrialization. Or just offer Africans resettlement in Europe and the United States, thereby preserving African wilderness.
- littletimmy 11y ago
  Why is the life of a Zimbabwean citizen more important than the life of a Zimbabwean lion?
  - hodwik 11y ago
    Because one of them is sentient.
    - anon4this1 11y ago
      I suppose this is what separates environmentalists from non-environmentalists. You have a fixed belief that any and every human life is more important than all animals or plants.
    - tonmoy 11y ago
      You suggest making better the life of the sentient being even if it kills a non-sentient being? What about a mentally handicapped person who is not sentient?
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      Both lions and humans (like most, or all, animals) are sentient. You may be referring to some concept of intelligent self-awareness, but you need to be more clear as to what it is to evaluate whether its a real difference between humans and lions; lots of animals have demonstrable self-awareness of various forms. I agree that the human condition is more important, but I don't think your explanation of why holds up.
      - hodwik 11y ago
        One of them we know to be sentient. We can't be so sure about lions. I'm not talking about higher-order intelligence, I'm talking about sentience -- the ability to experience. It is rather simple now to find a program that would defeat the original formulation for a Turing test, but no one would describe them as having consciousness. However, I believe it very possible that humans are doing much the same thing with a sort of sentience Turing test that we project onto animals. They _seem_ to have experience, because they react to stimuli. But the same is true of the computer. We know that creatures with basically nothing in the way of a brain, take earthworms or severed octopus tentacles, will react to pain, hide from it. We also know that pain has two parts -- a conscious experience, and an animal aversion. This is made clear by the existence of Pain asymbolia, where a person gets damage to the insular cortex (a lower part of the brain), and is no longer averse to pain, despite reporting that they still experience the pain just as they did before the injury. I believe it quite likely that consciousness exists in the human brain alone, and is of very recent evolutionary vintage, evolving in conjunction with language. That when humans project sentience on their pets they are basically falling in love with a biological automaton, no different from a person falling in love with a chat-bot. Unless we find a reason to believe that mere programming couldn't account for the behavior of animals (which seems increasingly unlikely, as our own rather rudimentary robots advance), it seems much more likely that evolution would have evolved the simple instinct system first -- only adding consciousness later on when it became an evolutionary necessity, as could have been the case for complex communication about qualia.

pc86 11y ago

> But don't you think the wildlife are equally important? The implicit end of that sentence is "equally important to the hundreds of millions of Africans living there." And to that, emphatically no. People are more important. Full stop. I am no anti-environmental activist. I want to see renewable energy take over fossil fuels, I want to see conscientious business taking environmental factors into account at all steps of production. But given the 100% false dichotomy of "African development" or "animals" I am going to pick the one that helps one of the most impoverished, war-torn regions on the planet every time.

anon4this1 11y ago
Humans are just an exponentially increasing function which will generally grow to consume the resources available to them. Why do they deserve to be prioritised over the millions of other species on earth?
- pc86 11y ago
  Given the choice between lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and offering huge economic opportunity to a stagnant global economy and some arbitrary (and disputed) danger to wildlife, development is the only choice. The snarky answer is probably something about how lions would not be setting up Human Preserves if the situations were reversed.
  - anon4this1 11y ago
    "lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty" Objectively, humanity most closely resembles a cancer. The more you feed it, the more it grows. It tramples everything in its path. The belief that somehow exponential economic growth is going to fix everything and everyone will lead happy middle class lives in some kind of harmony with nature is delusional. We are in the midst of the largest mass extinction event of all time. In developed places, the natural forests and wildlife are 90-95% gone. The only places where nature still truly thrives are in undeveloped regions - the rainforests of Papua New Guinea, the amazon, the plains of africa. As "development" accelerates in these places, they too will destroy nature in the name of the eternal quest for positive economic growth, attainment of first world healthcare, buying a car.
    - pc86 11y ago
      Then by all means, everyone who lives there can continue living in huts so that the trees aren't disturbed, right? This entire argument is insane.
      - littletimmy 11y ago
        What's wrong with people living in huts? People can be at harmony with nature, there's no need to force them into buildings. There certainly is no indication that living in a brick house makes someone happier than living in a hut.
      - anon4this1 11y ago
        In modern economic terms, subsistence living in small communities barely registers as existence at all. However it is the way most of humanity lived for most of history. And generally it seemed to be a satisfying way of life. We evolved to live in this way. We think of people living in situations of subsistence as being unbearably impoverished and disadvantaged now. We have no evidence that we are really any happier or more fulfilled than them. We have longer life expectancy, and we spend much of it isolated and lonely and sick.
- RhodesianHunter 11y ago
  No we aren't. Birth rates slow to replacement levels or lower in first world countries. Look at Japan, or the US and Germany which are only growing due to immigration.
  - 100timesthis 11y ago
    He is referring about consumption, not birth rates.
- ashwinaj 11y ago
  > Why do they deserve to be prioritised over the millions of other species on earth? Hmm...should save a human or an animal? Wow this sub thread is shocking. Let me throw in my obnoxious hat into the ring; why not get rid of useless/unproductive/racist/bigoted/terrorists/middle management people to save the animals? Even better, why don't I unilaterally decide who is important and who isn't just to save animals? Just....wow.
  - littletimmy 11y ago
    Is it the slippery slope you're worried about? Nobody is really talking about killing people in this thread. What is being said is that the unnecessary development of Africa will lead to a population explosion and vast increase in consumption of resources that will hurt animals. We should not be encouraging development, and should focus on curating the African wilderness.
    - douche 11y ago
      Who is this we? If people in Africa want to exploit their natural resources to develop and improve their lives, they should be free to do so. Everybody else has. It's a little hypocritical for Westerners who have already reaped the benefits and costs of development to pull the ladder up after themselves for the rest of the world. I'm not of the persuasion that colonialism was the worst thing ever since the start of time, but it is especially hypocritical and racist to say "Oh, sorry, we built some shoddy infrastructure, wrecked a lot of your traditional society, and used you to extract resources, now you should go back to living in grass huts and dying of treatable diseases to save the rhinos." If Africa can develop by skipping some of the shittier stages of agriculture->industry->post-industry evolution that we've experienced in the US, or Europe, or China, then that's a good thing.
      - littletimmy 11y ago
        Maybe the Westerners who exploited these lands should pay reparations to Africa and fast-track their development past industrialization. Or just offer Africans resettlement in Europe and the United States, thereby preserving African wilderness.
littletimmy 11y ago
Why is the life of a Zimbabwean citizen more important than the life of a Zimbabwean lion?
- hodwik 11y ago
  Because one of them is sentient.
  - anon4this1 11y ago
    I suppose this is what separates environmentalists from non-environmentalists. You have a fixed belief that any and every human life is more important than all animals or plants.
  - tonmoy 11y ago
    You suggest making better the life of the sentient being even if it kills a non-sentient being? What about a mentally handicapped person who is not sentient?
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    Both lions and humans (like most, or all, animals) are sentient. You may be referring to some concept of intelligent self-awareness, but you need to be more clear as to what it is to evaluate whether its a real difference between humans and lions; lots of animals have demonstrable self-awareness of various forms. I agree that the human condition is more important, but I don't think your explanation of why holds up.
    - hodwik 11y ago
      One of them we know to be sentient. We can't be so sure about lions. I'm not talking about higher-order intelligence, I'm talking about sentience -- the ability to experience. It is rather simple now to find a program that would defeat the original formulation for a Turing test, but no one would describe them as having consciousness. However, I believe it very possible that humans are doing much the same thing with a sort of sentience Turing test that we project onto animals. They _seem_ to have experience, because they react to stimuli. But the same is true of the computer. We know that creatures with basically nothing in the way of a brain, take earthworms or severed octopus tentacles, will react to pain, hide from it. We also know that pain has two parts -- a conscious experience, and an animal aversion. This is made clear by the existence of Pain asymbolia, where a person gets damage to the insular cortex (a lower part of the brain), and is no longer averse to pain, despite reporting that they still experience the pain just as they did before the injury. I believe it quite likely that consciousness exists in the human brain alone, and is of very recent evolutionary vintage, evolving in conjunction with language. That when humans project sentience on their pets they are basically falling in love with a biological automaton, no different from a person falling in love with a chat-bot. Unless we find a reason to believe that mere programming couldn't account for the behavior of animals (which seems increasingly unlikely, as our own rather rudimentary robots advance), it seems much more likely that evolution would have evolved the simple instinct system first -- only adding consciousness later on when it became an evolutionary necessity, as could have been the case for complex communication about qualia.