[JoshTriplett]

Solving a problem starts with seeing it as a problem rather than an immutable fact. And "suppose we didn't have the problem" is a thought experiment. In this case, it helps show the moral equivalence between killing people and stopping people from living longer.

[lisper]

I'm not saying we should stop people from trying to live longer. I'm saying be careful what you wish for.

[JoshTriplett]

I am aware that there are many additional things we'll have to solve as people live longer. Bring them on, they're better than the alternative.

And I appreciate that you aren't saying that we should stop people, but others are, and that's a serious problem.

[lisper]

To be clear: I do think it's a bad idea (or at least fraught with all manner of peril), and I do want to stop people, but not by force, but rather by persuading them that it's a bad idea, which is what I'm trying to do here. But if I fail to persuade you, I'm not going to stand in your way.

[JoshTriplett]

And I would like to persuade you to stop that, because I believe that in doing so you're making it marginally more likely that more people will die.

What would it take to convince you that whatever problems you're envisioning, they are not worse than 150,000 people dying every day, or 100 people ever minute? Take whatever value you attach to an individual specific identified human's death, say someone you actually care about dying rather than just a statistic, and try to imagine that happening almost twice a second, forever. There are problems that are still worth considering in comparison to that, but they're few and far between, and they all also involve human lives (e.g. "making the planet uninhabitable"), so they need solving at the same time and nobody is arguing for not solving them.

[lisper]

> What would it take to convince you that whatever problems you're envisioning, they are not worse than 150,000 people dying every day, or 100 people ever minute?

You'd have to start by convincing me that death is unconditionally bad.

If you could dramatically improve the quality of life for a million people by prematurely killing one, would you do it?

[JoshTriplett]

> > What would it take to convince you that whatever problems you're envisioning, they are not worse than 150,000 people dying every day, or 100 people ever minute?

> You'd have to start by convincing me that death is unconditionally bad.

That's not a point I'd try to argue. I'd argue that on balance, a human life has positive value, a human death is horrifically bad, and that the net value of 150,000 people dying every day is at the very least negative, not positive. Is that a point you're disputing?

I want to establish a baseline here, because while there are plenty of counterarguments to be had, I don't want to spend time mentioning or pointing to counterarguments for positions you don't hold or points you don't wish to argue. Which of the following (if any) are accurate descriptions of a position you hold?

1) You're arguing that on balance, there are resource constraints that make life worse for everyone if there are more people in the world, that people living longer (let alone forever) is on balance worse for people in the world, worse than the harm of those people dying. I can think of plenty of counterarguments to this.

2) You're arguing that there are specific people who will do a great deal of harm to society, that that harm would be substantially greater if those specific people live forever, and that there's less harm caused by killing them (or "letting them die", which you might not see as equivalent, though I do). There are plenty of counterarguments for this position.

3) You're arguing that on balance, society needs some kind of regular "turnover" of who is in power, and that death helps serve this function, and that this function is important enough to justify continuing to let mass numbers of people die. I know plenty of counterarguments for this too.

4) You're making some other argument tantamount to a "tragedy of the commons", where the incremental value of an individual human life is positive but you're concerned about the limit as those numbers keep going up and other numbers don't.

5) You're arguing that for some reason other than the above, most or all people should die, and that this is on balance not a bad thing, or even that this is a net good. This would be a rather broad gulf of fundamental values to attempt to bridge; I can imagine some places to start but it'd require a lot more information about exactly what your values are that support this position.

(I'm also going to reiterate, as my own baseline, that every time you imagine a number of people dying and try to assign a net value involving that, you would need to imagine every one of the 100 deaths per minute, 150,000 per day, 57,000,000+ per year, every single one being as awful as someone you personally care about being killed. That's incredibly hard to do, and it's hard for anyone to process on that scale either; the most I've managed is to calibrate to "mind-bogglingly worse than any possible intuition I can fathom even taking into account everything I've said here".)