[tvier]

This comment defines value as what people pay for things, then comes to the conclusion that they way to value people must be based on what people will pay for them.

That's not insightful, that's just circular reasoning, and it fails to explain normal human behavior.

Does a child have no value to it's parents because it's "easily produced"[1] and "disposable and replaceable"?

[1] I imagine OP has never given birth

[ap99]

I think it's more trying to say, if an individual cannot support themselves or provide value to others who can support them then those other intangible factors don't matter too much.

In the first world we have a ton of excess value so we can do things like homeless shelters, charity, socialized medicine, etc.

But if we suddenly don't have that excess value to spread around and it becomes either I eat today or you eat today and I'm the one who farmed the wheat and made the bread -- me and my family are going to eat today.

We go back to "fair" very fast.

[tvier]

I think that is a more clear framing of what the OP was saying, and if they had written it that way I probably wouldn't have bothered replying. It just had a very fatalistic tone I didn't agree with.

I still disagree though, the relationship between scarcity and generosity is very complex.

And as an aside, homeless shelters and socialized medicine are cheaper than the alternatives in developed nations, so I would argue those are the sign of good governance rather than excess value. Although that depends on your definition of value...

[_DeadFred_]

If you're focused on farming and I'm focused on taking the product of your labor I win. Your attention/resources are split between producing and defending yourself/survival. Mine is entirely focused on extraction.

Over time the imbalance compounds. I spend all my effort improving the mechanisms of coercion and extraction. You split yours between survival and production. I get better at taking you get just good enough at surviving to keep producing. The system stabilizes around that balance with you allowed enough to survive, but not enough to escape the cycle.

We have had extra excess because for a little while enough of us didn't think in the hundred thousand year old way you wrote. But the 'modern' tech bro world isn't able to get away from the hundred thousand year old thinking. And generations of progress potentially erode because the systems of power guiding them haven’t evolved beyond ancient incentives with all signs now pointing to new locked in systems of control instead of shared prosperity.

[Mathnerd314]

Well, I mean, you can certainly say economic value doesn't capture all of the value. But you can also say that there are metrics of value that do capture everything. Thermodynamic entropy, for example - its steady march to zero is statistically unstoppable. You can't measure a child's economic value without making a lot of assumptions, but you can measure a child's thermodynamic heat production with a few simple experiments. It might sound a little out there, but I've been looking at the maximum entropy production principle and some books on thermodynamics, and there really is a lot that is applicable to calculations about human systems. Viewing humans as dissipative structures designed to maximize entropy production really explains a lot about how the world works. Notably, some questions about our energy usage patterns. AI may not be useful economically yet, but it's excellent at dissipating heat.

[nuancebydefault]

In fact entropy is relative to what we define as chaos vs what we define as ordered. When we can't explain the order, we define it as being chaotic, and for convenience we model it statistically in stead of in absolute terms. I learned that few months ago from a HN posted article.

[tvier]

This comment brings me so much joy, it might be the most "hackernews" thing I've ever read.

I don't disagree though. Everything is physics, and physics is applied math

[sifar]

I look at it from the other side. Life, and by extension human civilization,is a local entropy minimization mechanism.

[hiclemi]

Yeah, exactly! Market value and personal/relational value are completely different axes. Conflating the two is a category error and not insight..

[abcde666777]

Just going to poke you a little for the statement about not having children ;). It strikes me as a little elitist and I'll tell you why:

You don't need to have had children to have loved people and to have lost people, and to fully understand the depth and weight of those things.

[tvier]

I didn't mean to imply that you hadn't cared, or felt loss. That would definitely be presumptuous.

I was only commenting on the "easily produced" comment. I don't think I've heard someone describe pregnancy and childbirth that way ;)

[CodeMage]

The "not having children" part of the comment was clearly marked as a footnote attached to the quote about how children are "easily produced".

[Dibes]

I believe they were trying to push back on the easily word in "easily produced". While, thank god, modern medicine makes birthing dramatically safer than at any time in history, it is still an incredibly taxing process on the human body and still fundamentally dangerous. It is not "easy" per-se.

[isjcjsjcnjd]

C’mon now, let’s not be intentionally obtuse to try and sound smart adding “yes, but” to a perfectly solid argument. Children are easily produced, that’s a fact. The process of child bearing is not in question, but rather the availability of willing partners (hell, even unwilling, if we’re getting that dark) and how little effort it generally takes to get the conception process going.

They were making a point that it’s much easier to generate a human being than it is actually generating economically meaningful value. One needs a few minutes of your time and gets you feeling really good at the end of the process, and the other can (and often does) require years of effort, toil and sweat (all of which can catastrophically fail rendering your efforts moot).

Generating a new human is, indeed, comparatively easy.

[wobfan]

> One needs a few minutes of your time and gets you feeling really good at the end of the process

Ah yes, and after the intercourse the child spawns, I remember. And then it just leaves and goes somewhere and starts it's own life. No pain, work, food, time or whatever involved. Just having sex and feeling good.

> years of effort, toil and sweat

Would be a shame if that would be needed to produce a human being.

[hypeatei]

> and it fails to explain normal human behavior.

...which is what exactly? My best guess is that you're implying "normal human behavior" is unconditional love and support? That's an idealistic view that doesn't hold true for everyone (even in the first world) as GP pointed out.

I think this idealistic type of mindset, which seems to be a collective agreement to blow smoke up each other's asses, has done a lot more harm than good. You get thrashed between the reality that everything is conditional and the ideal which is that you're unique and special just by existing, with the latter being delusion IMO.

[tvier]

My intention was to imply that normal human behavior involves doing things that aren't economically beneficial.

Why play piano at home when you could use that energy to work? Why go to the bar and pay more for a drink than you would at home?

Because of this, equating all human value to monetary value doesn't accurately reflect the world.