wayward-sidekick:

Statistics on “how many humans have ever lived” are just a pet peeve of mine. How are you defining human? Does a Neanderthal count? What about Homo erectus? What about early Homo sapiens, which was anatomically modern but not behaviourally modern?

It’s easy to just say “well, biologists have decided what counts as a human by assigning things to Homo sapiens, and we trust biologists, so we’ll count Homo sapiens”, but if you’re actually using this stat to make some kind of point, like about how many meaningfully human deaths we have to mourn or how much contribution the average human made to the progress of history or what percentile of awesomeness you’re on if you include all humans to ever live, you need actual criteria based on sentience / technological competence / eligibility for awesomeness

So would you propose the -10K mark? Do it for each geographic area based on time-since-agriculture? Time-since-language?

Notes

  1. napoleonchingon reblogged this from wayward-sidekick and added:
    I guess the fact that we disagree on what’s a reasonable definition of “human sensu lato” proves your point so I’m wrong...
  2. femmenietzsche reblogged this from pistachi0n and added:
    I can’t find a source for this, but I’ve seen people argue that the cutoff for when people became human doesn’t actually...
  3. wayward-sidekick reblogged this from napoleonchingon and added:
    …why is the least restrictive H. erectus on? Like I’d assume at *least* H. habilis (It’s Homo, It Counts) but depending...
  4. pistachi0n reblogged this from earnest-peer and added:
    Taxonomy is sort of fake, by which I mean that when you’re defining a species (or higher taxonomic group) you just have...
  5. earnest-peer reblogged this from earnest-peer and added:
    This, btw, is also my opinion on the ethics part of “is abortion murder? / Are fetuses persons?” - ~0 at conception, ~1...
  6. thefutureoneandall reblogged this from evolution-is-just-a-theorem and added:
    Hilariously, the answer to this question changes the results of the Doomsday Argument. Maybe not a ton, but if your...
  7. evolution-is-just-a-theorem reblogged this from earnest-peer and added:
    Seems pretty reasonable. Better than just setting an arbitrary cutoff somewhere because you feel like it.
  8. shedoesnotcomprehend said: I would (very naïvely) expect that population growth means the exact definition of “when do we start counting hominids as humans” ends up being a rounding error. Is that accurate, or is the margin of reasonable disagreement there large enough that the impact on the total number of humans ever is significant even though populations were pretty small at that point?
  9. dataandphilosophy reblogged this from wayward-sidekick and added:
    So would you propose the -10K mark? Do it for each geographic area based on time-since-agriculture? Time-since-language?
  10. argumate said: *points to skeleton* no homo