PhD student in NLP
Anssi Moisio
Karma: 6
Most people want as much money as they can get
This is true other things being equal: everyone wants money if they don’t need to spend time or effort to get it. I wonder how many people make this instrumental value one of their intrinsic values, and sacrifice some of their other intrinsic values in order to focus on getting more money.
I would question this. The claim is true if you replace “humans” with “homo economicus”, or humans that are conditioned by the culture of raising the “standard of living” infinitely. I don’t think humans in general “tend to develop the drive to exploit more resources”. But then there is the separate question of whether those cultures that seek infinite resources always supplant those that don’t. The answer may be that they do but that does not mean it’s in the human nature to seek infinite resources. Seeking infinite resources seems to me like confusing an instrumental value for an intrinsic value, i.e. like a misalignment of human culture: maximising not paperclips but some other resource that doesn’t actually have intrinsic value to us.