[Depurator]

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?

[hazbot]

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!

[Depurator]

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

[shepherdjerred]

A human centric view is not unreasonable.

[sph]

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

[yareal]

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

[xyzzy4747]

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.

[caskstrength]

> 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.

[willi59549879]

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.

[timeon]

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

[politelemon]

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