4 ms·

Assessment of life on Earth reveals humanity’s disproportionate impact

41 points by mcone 8y ago

perl4ever 8y ago
That title distills a reasonably non-contradictory article down into something nonsensical. Oddly, the URL seems to be coherent and reflective of the article. "human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study" This suggests the title "Human race just 0.01% of all life but has destroyed over 80% of wild mammals" might be a better one.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  It would still be deceptive, connecting proportions of two different groups, and implying a moral value which would not be implied by a more honest comparison.
- coderdude 8y ago
  It's common knowledge that article titles suck and are rarely ever more than somewhat accurate with regards to an article's contents. It's not the job of the title creator to be 100% accurate. It's their job to do whatever it was they did to make the person who submitted this to HN, do that thing. It worked. We should take a moment to internalize how we can use that knowledge and then move on. To emphasize, it's not important and we should be the group extracting this sort of meta knowledge of how the world around us works, not missing the point entirely and complaining about it on the net. I don't think the "hacker mantra" is to be nitpicky and myopic.
SeoxyS 8y ago
The article doesn't make it clear whether it's 83% of biomass that went extinct, 83% of individual animals, or 73% of species.
John_KZ 8y ago
>Of all the mammals on Earth, 96% are livestock and humans, only 4% are wild mammals >70% of birds are chickens and other poultry The articles fails to mention the obvious fact that these ratios are shifted because we breed more livestock animals, not because we kill wild ones. >All life on Earth is made up of 82% plants and found in 86% on land 1% in the oceans Which is also a completely wrong statement. Anyone with a highschool diploma knows that the ocean contains a huge amount of biomass, probably larger than all terrestrial life combined. The article seems to be taking the position that we should only have an effect on the environment proportional to our biomass ratio with other mammals. I don't understand this idea. Are they saying more humans should die, or that more animals should die? What kind of ratio are they optimizing for?

41 points by mcone 8y ago

That title distills a reasonably non-contradictory article down into something nonsensical. Oddly, the URL seems to be coherent and reflective of the article. "human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study" This suggests the title "Human race just 0.01% of all life but has destroyed over 80% of wild mammals" might be a better one.

microcolonel 8y ago
It would still be deceptive, connecting proportions of two different groups, and implying a moral value which would not be implied by a more honest comparison.
coderdude 8y ago
It's common knowledge that article titles suck and are rarely ever more than somewhat accurate with regards to an article's contents. It's not the job of the title creator to be 100% accurate. It's their job to do whatever it was they did to make the person who submitted this to HN, do that thing. It worked. We should take a moment to internalize how we can use that knowledge and then move on. To emphasize, it's not important and we should be the group extracting this sort of meta knowledge of how the world around us works, not missing the point entirely and complaining about it on the net. I don't think the "hacker mantra" is to be nitpicky and myopic.

SeoxyS 8y ago

The article doesn't make it clear whether it's 83% of biomass that went extinct, 83% of individual animals, or 73% of species.

John_KZ 8y ago

>Of all the mammals on Earth, 96% are livestock and humans, only 4% are wild mammals >70% of birds are chickens and other poultry The articles fails to mention the obvious fact that these ratios are shifted because we breed more livestock animals, not because we kill wild ones. >All life on Earth is made up of 82% plants and found in 86% on land 1% in the oceans Which is also a completely wrong statement. Anyone with a highschool diploma knows that the ocean contains a huge amount of biomass, probably larger than all terrestrial life combined. The article seems to be taking the position that we should only have an effect on the environment proportional to our biomass ratio with other mammals. I don't understand this idea. Are they saying more humans should die, or that more animals should die? What kind of ratio are they optimizing for?