I have to say that i'm so tired of reading these things - as interesting it might be to read about some whackos like them - that just being apalled is not enough to describe how repulsive is a world in which human value is used like a number - especially if it is pulled out of their arse just to hide their racism, classism, sexism (ecc ecc)
> how repulsive is a world in which human value is used like a number
On the surface, morally, I agree with you.
But when it comes to practice, things get tougher. Whether capitalist or communist or random utopia, ultimately most of it comes down to: how do we decide, individually and collectively, how each person spends their finite time on Earth? While imperfect, in most places we use money as a way to compensate individuals for the time they’ve spent performing an activity that they wouldn’t have spent time doing on their own. They can then trade that money for the product of other peoples’ labour (things that they wouldn’t have done on their own).
Distilling it down to a dollar value sucks, but is essentially acting as a proxy for “how many hours of how many of the right peoples’ lives gets spent on solving problem X?”. Problem X could be an individual problem: how many hours of how many oncologists lives should be spent trying to cure this specific person’s cancer? And given a finite supply of oncologists and a finite number of hours each one can work in a day, how do we divide their time between different patients? This scales up to national and international levels; people work, the governments take some fraction of that compensation and redistribute it to others in order to take on tasks that people and companies don’t want to do on their own for free. But there’s a finite amount of that money too, stemming from there being a finite number of humans qualified to solve specific problems and finite time from each of them.
But we're talking about people willing to sacrifice people for a hypothetical scenario of doomsday to avoid.
Yes, allocating funds to research is something that has to be done to distribute resources given they're not infinite. But that's a real scenario. Not people pulling bayesian bs in a bad way with random numbers they agree with. It's a completely different scenario, even if resource allocation is necessary in our lifes
