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wgp3 t1_ixentkl wrote

Never said it would create renewables. You pointed out it was a waste because there are children starving now. So clearly you think starving children is the priority and money shouldn't be wasted on other advancements that may have longer pay off times.

I pointed out that renewable energy investment doesn't help starving children now either.

Define quality of life? Do video games improve quality of life? Does faster computing power? Better displays? Do sports improve quality of life? What about astronomy? What about quantum physics? Geology? Art?

There's a lot of things out there that either don't directly improve quality of life or don't improve quality of life at all depending on your definition.

Should we funnel all money related to video games into feeding starving children? Literally a 100 billion dollar business annually. Think of how much that would help starving children. Which is more important? Playing games instead of going outside or feeding starving children? Creating art museums or feeding starving children? Funding space telescopes or feeding starving children? Having YouTube or feeding starving children?

If you can't answer any of those it's because they're stupid questions. If you answer feeding starving children and aren't willing to ever speak out against every other thing then why speak out over this one?

Truth is you will never eliminate every single injustice or bad thing in the world. It's a ridiculously stupid goal to say you can't do something until every other issue is solved or unless it provides some strict utilitarian function defined by something as ambiguous as "quality of life".

It's especially hypocritical when the use case is unknown. How can we know what all may be learned or discovered when we haven't done the thing yet? People could have argued for feeding the poor instead of building out a highway system. Or instead of funding research on electromagnetism. They couldn't have predicted how useful it would be for making life better from a quality of life standpoint. Nor does quality of life capture how important it is for people to dream and be inspired by things. Even if those things have intangible benefits.

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