The big issue here is that us monkeys really can't comprehend scale (insert classic links to studies on scope insensitivity here). Heuristics that work well for groups of up to a few thousand people stop working when there are hundreds of millions.
There is genuinely and honestly a number of days of people chilling on the beach with their family that is worth a life (or more accurately, shortening a life by ~50 years), and it's probably less than a million.
This calculus doesn't make much sense. Multiply any enormous number of people by a few minutes and you'll get hundreds of lives equivalent time.
That's pretty much the kind of fallacy behind "if all people on Earth give 10$ for <cause> we can solve <big problem mankind hadn't solve in a century>."
For most people it's supposedly something like 10^2.5 or ~300 people in your monkey sphere of varying levels of importance. So, in an exponential sort of way its decent rounding :P
I see this a lot and it's very strange to see super smart people such as yourself conflate <number of people> with <time>. We cannot observe long-term effects through number of people.
I see this a lot and it's very strange to see super smart people such as yourself conflate <number of people> with <time>. We cannot observe long-term effects through number of people.
The value itself might be wrong but there's no denying that a human cannot conceptualize an infinite number of other humans as "people". When you see a news story about two hundred miners dying in an industrial accident you don't feel two hundred times as sad as when you read about a single-vehicle fatality in your hometown.
The point is that everything at scale as an impact that looks big when aggregated... if you don't actually look at the scale.
135 out of 1B isn't big at all, it just looks big because of the biases we have when interpreting big numbers. Not mentioning the fact that the aggregation isn't very relevant (it's not like 135 people will have their entire life wasted while the others are not annoyed at all).
At this scale, a factor of magnitude or two is of little consequence, and odds are, you can get general buy-in within a "factor of magnitude or two" of the number of humans to live from the vast bulk of people who might have sensible opinions.
I'm not sure if the Earth is large enough to distribute 8 billion humans into sufficiently separated small groups, and such a scheme isn't even on the political horizon.
> Anyway, the question I think people should talk about -- and it's absolutely taboo -- is, how many people should there be? And I think it should be about 100 million or maybe 500 million. And then notice that a great many of these problems disappear. If you had 100 million people properly spread out, then if there's some garbage, you throw it away, preferably where you can't see it, and it will rot. Or you throw it into the ocean and some fish will benefit from it. The problem is, how many people should there be?
Well given flights is 1/50th of the equation maybe your the one that needs the math class. 50 hurdles to fix the problem is bugger all. Start w the easy shit like flights and eat the rich as we work our way back up the ladder.
1/50th is quite a large percent. Lol let's angle this another way... Would you be ok with ending the life of 2% of earth's population? I mean it's only roughly 156 million out of 7.6 billion. Drop in the ocean right? Micro percentage!
Our human instincts can't deal with how many people there are in the world. A doctor can only treat one person at a time; even one who was saving a life every time they operated - let's say twice a day - would probably be saving less person-hours than someone who can make Google's results 1% faster. Our instincts recoil at the idea that that's more important (mine included), but our instincts were formed in a time when we lived in tribes of at most a few hundred.
As the number of people on the planet grows, regression to the mean at global scale becomes more and more necessary to do anything at global scale.
Humans get to not appeal to the lowest common denominator when they aren't in groups numbering in the billions.
(... this is a fancy way of saying "There's a reason the jokes you'll tell your friends in the privacy of your own home you might not tell a stranger on the street").
"Besides there aren't that many ways to divide the world by 100 Million people, there are 76."
There are (7.6B choose 100M) = (7600000000! / (100000000! * 7500000000!)) > well over a googol. Different ways to slice up the world do not have to be disjoint.
Nobody is talking about lone humans. They're talking about the difference between 8 billion and 16 billion. It's not likely that any significant economies of scale that have somehow not managed to emerge at 8 billion people will emerge when you double that.
There is genuinely and honestly a number of days of people chilling on the beach with their family that is worth a life (or more accurately, shortening a life by ~50 years), and it's probably less than a million.
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