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> We are rubbing up against the reality that most humans are less and less valuable to other humans such that they are basically valueless, By what standard ar

> We are rubbing up against the reality that most humans are less and less valuable to other humans such that they are basically valueless, By what standard are we "valuing humans less" ? This seems to fly against the facts. Global death from almost all causes have gone down. e.g. "Battle" related death - which is the most clear evidence of valuing human life less than political gains have dramatically fallen: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/battle-related-deaths-in-state-based-conflicts-since-1946 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/battle-related-deaths-in-... Global life expectancy is higher than ever in the history of human civilization and still rising: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy Global poverty rate has been dropping dramatically and steadily: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty Global education spending has been going up. Air pollution has been going down, steadily and dramatically: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-deaths-indoor-pollution?tab=table&time=2017 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-deaths-indoor-pollu... Tell me. In what way are we valuing human less ?

drivebycomment 6y ago
Let me put more concrete, recent evidences that we value human life more, not less. Black lives matter. By any standard, it's clear racial discrimination has gotten better over the years (it's still nowhere near good enough, but better than in the past, even only by small relative amount), as there's no doubt police brutality has been worse in the past. But why are we outraging now ? Each single death now matters more now, because each injustice has much higher chance of getting broadcast and shared widely. What would have been ignored and silently covered up are now seeing the eyes of the world, and the direct consequence of that is the enormous movement. New Tsunami Sea Wall in Japan. https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/mar/09/after-the-tsunami-japan-sea-walls-in-pictures https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/mar/09/after-... https://www.wired.com/story/photo-gallery-japan-seawalls/ https://www.wired.com/story/photo-gallery-japan-seawalls/ Whether you agree that's a good idea or not, you can't deny the fact that now Japan is spending tremendous amount of money to protect the lives of relatively small number of people, and it had a popular support in Japan, meaning Japanese were more than happy to spend tons of money to protect their fellow citizens.
ralusek 6y ago
I wrote that comment when I was drunk, so let me try to clarify. I don't mean we value human life less in the way that a woke 14 year old means that, which is the way you seem to have interpreted it. I mean it in the sense of market value. Technology and market efficiency are leading to your average person being less valuable to other people, and fewer people being substantially more valuable. Maybe one farmer can now feed 100,000 people. The 999 people it used to take to feed those 100,000 people are actually less valuable to society than they were prior to the technological and market advances that allowed that one person to feed 100,000 people. Sure they can get different jobs, and new jobs are created, but there is no guarantee that this happens according to any functional ratio; it's certainly not 1:1. This is essentially why wages are stagnating. Most people are actually worth less to society than they used to be. And again, I don't mean that in the woke sense, I mean it in the market sense. I mean that wages are accurately reflecting their true market value, and that value is less and less as time goes on. I think that the minimum barrier to entry in order to produce market value is constantly rising, and is basically happening on the basis of something like IQ. Maybe the next century will be characterized by more jobs like software and hardware engineers, while even those jobs will change and eventually be done by fewer and fewer people, but the point is that not everyone will actually be able to do those jobs. If nurses and doctors and PAs are phased out in favor of diagnostic algorithms and service utilities, for example, that doesn't mean that those millions of roles will have millions of new roles created in order to service the technology. And more importantly, the new roles to service the technology might actually require capabilities that most of those people are not actually capable of. I'm not making a statement about society being some way and it should be some other way. I'm saying that our societies are fundamentally predicated on the notion that stability can be achieved simply due to the idea that people provide relative value to one another. This idea is what has allowed liberal democracies to function with minimal authoritarian influence. That most people are capable of providing sufficient utility to one another such that, left to their own devices, they are able to secure resources for themselves by providing utility to others. This is less true now than it was, and will continue to be less true as time goes on. All I'm saying is that we're approaching a hinge point where we have to grapple with this reality.

drivebycomment 6y ago

Let me put more concrete, recent evidences that we value human life more, not less. Black lives matter. By any standard, it's clear racial discrimination has gotten better over the years (it's still nowhere near good enough, but better than in the past, even only by small relative amount), as there's no doubt police brutality has been worse in the past. But why are we outraging now ? Each single death now matters more now, because each injustice has much higher chance of getting broadcast and shared widely. What would have been ignored and silently covered up are now seeing the eyes of the world, and the direct consequence of that is the enormous movement. New Tsunami Sea Wall in Japan. https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/mar/09/after-the-tsunami-japan-sea-walls-in-pictures https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/mar/09/after-... https://www.wired.com/story/photo-gallery-japan-seawalls/ https://www.wired.com/story/photo-gallery-japan-seawalls/ Whether you agree that's a good idea or not, you can't deny the fact that now Japan is spending tremendous amount of money to protect the lives of relatively small number of people, and it had a popular support in Japan, meaning Japanese were more than happy to spend tons of money to protect their fellow citizens.

ralusek 6y ago

I wrote that comment when I was drunk, so let me try to clarify. I don't mean we value human life less in the way that a woke 14 year old means that, which is the way you seem to have interpreted it. I mean it in the sense of market value. Technology and market efficiency are leading to your average person being less valuable to other people, and fewer people being substantially more valuable. Maybe one farmer can now feed 100,000 people. The 999 people it used to take to feed those 100,000 people are actually less valuable to society than they were prior to the technological and market advances that allowed that one person to feed 100,000 people. Sure they can get different jobs, and new jobs are created, but there is no guarantee that this happens according to any functional ratio; it's certainly not 1:1. This is essentially why wages are stagnating. Most people are actually worth less to society than they used to be. And again, I don't mean that in the woke sense, I mean it in the market sense. I mean that wages are accurately reflecting their true market value, and that value is less and less as time goes on. I think that the minimum barrier to entry in order to produce market value is constantly rising, and is basically happening on the basis of something like IQ. Maybe the next century will be characterized by more jobs like software and hardware engineers, while even those jobs will change and eventually be done by fewer and fewer people, but the point is that not everyone will actually be able to do those jobs. If nurses and doctors and PAs are phased out in favor of diagnostic algorithms and service utilities, for example, that doesn't mean that those millions of roles will have millions of new roles created in order to service the technology. And more importantly, the new roles to service the technology might actually require capabilities that most of those people are not actually capable of. I'm not making a statement about society being some way and it should be some other way. I'm saying that our societies are fundamentally predicated on the notion that stability can be achieved simply due to the idea that people provide relative value to one another. This idea is what has allowed liberal democracies to function with minimal authoritarian influence. That most people are capable of providing sufficient utility to one another such that, left to their own devices, they are able to secure resources for themselves by providing utility to others. This is less true now than it was, and will continue to be less true as time goes on. All I'm saying is that we're approaching a hinge point where we have to grapple with this reality.