> but I guarantee every single person on HN will rather take the chance of malaria than the certainty of not being born in the first place.

Perhaps that's true. But what about kids in all the destitute places on the planet? Using an average HN user as your test case just shows how biased your perspective is. Personally I'd rather not be born than be born in a place where I have a high change of dying of malaria, or dysentery.

Exactly how is it relevant that you would rather not be born than be born in rural poverty? Congratulations. Nobody asked you, or anybody else. Now what?

> Nobody asked you, or anybody else.

Huh? And nobody asked you to reply to his comment. My goodness tptacek, this is a discussion board. Open-ended conversations take place here that drift off to all places. Sometimes they lead to interesting points, sometimes they don't. I see no reason to mock someone for that.

if Tptacek had said "nobody asked you " I would agree. But he said nobody asked you or anyone else. None of us chose to be born, nor born into the circumstances we find ourselves. As we cannot control if we win or lose the lottery of western luxury or extreme poverty, those on the winning side should say "let's fix this" not "well if I was that unlucky I would rather be dead, so why can't they all just die and leave me alone" which is rather the undercurrent I was reading.

Perhaps if you dusted off the old reading comprehension you would realize I was responding specifically to the claim that nobody on HN would X. I am someone on HN therefore my counter-point was very relevant.

> I'd rather not be born than be born in a place where I have a high change of dying of malaria, or dysentery.

Seriously? You prefer a 0% chance, over, say, a 60% chance?

But then I'd jump at the offer of a 4% chance of making it over a 0% chance any day, so I guess it's just a different mindset.

When people say things like this, I wish there really was a god we could invoke and offer these people the opportunity to put their life where their mouth is, put them in front of a god who offers them two buttons: push this one to never exists, or push that one to be born "in a place where I have a high change of dying of malaria, or dysentery" - I'd feel pretty confident betting money most of them would have a sudden change of heart.

EDIT: Come to think of it, if he's correct in his assumption that the non-privileged people of the world would tend to share his opinion, we should expect to see extremely high levels of suicide in these regions should we not?

Suicide is not the same not being born. Why is that concept so hard to grasp?

The whole idea of rather not having been born is specifically because that precludes any of those emotions that make it hard to off yourself no matter how bad your situation is. It also removes the usual arguments against suicide such as impact on your family and friends.

It's not exactly the same. But if the life is so harsh that it's not worth living, more people would commit suicide, at least those with no families.

I'm happy to consider that going through the act of suicide has some additional emotional overhead that could account for a lower rate than we might expect. But, will you consider the possibility that maybe life in a 3rd world country isn't actually so bad that it isn't worth living?

Sure I freely admit that life in a 3rd world country isn't necessarily so horrible that its not worth living. Of course, I'm a bit puzzled where you derived that implication from any of my statements.

My original statement was simply a personal preference that I would choose not to live a life of suffering out of some romantic idea of the nobility of suffering, and that I'm sure there are plenty of people (especially those who end up on the wrong side of the statistics of various diseases) who would agree. It's absurd to think that someone should want to struggle through any sort of adversity for the chance of making it through on the other side. The rationality of this choice would completely depend on the various probabilities involved.

>But if the life is so harsh that it's not worth living, more people would commit suicide, at least those with no families.

This also isn't true. The self-preservation instinct is a powerful force. One can rationally decide that life isn't worth living but still be incapable of actually ending it.

> Sure I freely admit that life in a 3rd world country isn't necessarily so horrible that its not worth living. Of course, I'm a bit puzzled where you derived that implication from any of my statements.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6719288 "Personally I'd rather not be born than be born in a place where I have a high change of dying of malaria, or dysentery."

Maybe it's a nuance of the language, but "rather not be born" and "not worth living" are roughly equivalent in my interpretation.

While life in the 3rd world, or places where you have a high change of dying of malaria, dysentery, etc is not a walk in the park, except for the very worst places people are probably far happier than you imagine. The human spirit is really quite resilient.

At the end of the day, I think we'll both decide to believe what we want on the matter. :)

The 0% chance is simply not existing. The people who fail the 60% chance (or your 4% chance) live lives of pain and misery. Perhaps talk to someone seeking euthanasia about whether life in pain and misery is worth living?

Ok, ask the people who have already decided that, for them, it's not.

But you don't exactly see millions of people offing themselves, so clearly the human spirit survives such adverse conditions?

Dying and never being born are two wildly different things.

Unfortunately it is currently difficult to ask the unborn, so you do one of two things:

1) Rely on their prospective parents decision. To improve the parents decision making you attempt to improve their education and increase access to contraception.

2) Enforce laws about how many children a couple can have.

Most places have followed method (1). China followed method (2) (but also increased education).

Both methods seem to have resulted in dramatically better standards of living in less than a generation, and many people from drastically poor areas have gone on to live fulfilling lives.

Indeed some have accomplished more than I ever will - for example, the greatest distance runner of all time[1] grew up as 1 of 10 children of subsistence farmers during the Ethiopian 83-85 famine[2]. You can't get much deeper in poverty than that, and yet he won 2 Olympic Gold medals, 8 World Championships and broke 27 world records.

I'm unconvinced he would think he should never have been born.

Also - as the linked article shows - it is possible to tackle problems like malaria relatively easily and cheaply, if there is the will for it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Gebrselassie

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983%E2%80%9385_famine_in_Ethi...

>I'm unconvinced he would think he should never have been born.

Yeah... the 1 in a million person is always the wrong person to ask. Perhaps if you asked the millions who have suffered and died if they would have been better off not ever being born, you might get a more meaningful statistic.

> More people is a good thing

A sustainable population is better. There are many indications that the current world population is unsustainable. With the oceans being quickly depleted of fish, for one small example, I doubt that even 2 billion people can survive in the long run. Everyone eating Solyent is not a solution in my book.

I don't think you understood his comment fully. He was not claiming that "people think gosh I have 1000 more calories, I will have another child" it's that with increasing lifespans globally, the population is booming, but the "world that knows it should use its wealth to provide decent sanitation, opportunities, education, peace and justice" doesn't exist anywhere but your head. So the world pop is now 7 billion + but the things needed to keep that population in a good condition are not manifesting.

Essentially we are setting ourselves up for things like massive famines, biological diseases, etc.

It has nothing to do with happiness, and more people means more people suffering.

That's what Erlich said, while people like Borlaug successfully worked the problem.

> but the "world that knows it should use its wealth to provide decent sanitation, opportunities, education, peace and justice" doesn't exist anywhere but your head.

Incorrect, that idea exists in the heads of many people, and many of them are doing something about it.

> the things needed to keep that population in a good condition are not manifesting.

Incorrect. Standard of living is improving for most people.

> Essentially we are setting ourselves up for things like massive famines, biological diseases, etc.

I'm open minded and willing to be convinced, but it will take more than a mere opinion. I don't see anything compelling in the news that even suggests this is likely.

> It has nothing to do with happiness, and more people means more people suffering.

So we shall just ignore happiness, but focus on suffering? Got it.

Here are some good papers, there are lots more, but a small primer on what I am talking about.

Bottom line is this, I was replying to the response to this comment "More people living doesn't necessarily mean people living better lives. In a finite world with limits to growth, relaxing one bottleneck only leads to the next bottleneck." that said "this doesn't even make sense"

I'm showing that it does make some sense, though there is plenty of room for debate. I think too many people misinterpreted his comment for Malthusianism.

Here are a few papers on the matter:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1846696/pdf/brme...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3586590/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1811054/pdf/proc...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1332674/

>Granted there are now lots of other things to kill the child, malaria etc, but I guarantee every single person on HN will rather take the chance of malaria than the certainty of not being born in the first place.

Actually no. More people isn't automatically good. Taken to it's extreme this would mean just making as many people as is physically possible with the lowest standard of living possible. There has to be some trade off between number of people vs happiness per person.

Then there is the many worlds thing argument http://lesswrong.com/lw/ws/for_the_people_who_are_still_aliv...

"but I guarantee every single person on HN will rather take the chance of malaria than the certainty of not being born in the first place."

You would have to assume that anyone who didn't want to be here would have topped themselves already.