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The economic angle is convincing only to sociopaths.

Sane people don't kill people to save money.



The hubris is astounding. Pick up a history book and lay your eyes upon the horrors that have been enacted by "good people". Literally every organization over a few hundred people where everyone is mostly just optimizing for their KPIs within their role behaves like a sociopath.


> The hubris is astounding.

Who me? You have no idea...

> Pick up a history book and lay your eyes upon the horrors that have been enacted by "good people".

I am a keen student of history, that's part of the reason I seldom leave the house. I know what people are like.

It seems to me that we are recovering from some disaster that deranged us in the prehistoric past. My favorite theory was the Younger Dryas comet impact, but I've gone off that recently. But it doesn't matter. Maybe our hominid past was itself sufficiently traumatic, and the condition we are recovering from is the human condition.

> Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.

~Robert Anton Wilson

The horrors of the past do not justify the horrors of the present, they motivate the ongoing process of becoming a sane and mature sentient species.


> Sane people don't kill people to save money.

Of course, that isn't true in the abstract. Some number of people die in the US annually for lack of government spending on healthcare, and presumably we could spend less and kill more people, or vice versa.

Government healthcare systems are kind of fundamentally a tradeoff between spending and saving lives.


There's a difference between killing someone and not saving someone's life.


On a spreadsheet, they look quite the same.


Does this mean you should always pull the lever in the trolley problem?


That seems like a philosophical argument.


You're not sick, or old yet.

It gets less philosophical the longer you live.


Sure, but believing them to be the same is also a philosophical argument.




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