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Comment by Ultimatt | Hacker News Reader

Human race is a bit of a stretch. "The most productive scientists and engineers working collaboratively in well funded labs/projects, in a political minority of countries that can support that level of high technology publicly or privately". Most of us are just flicking through twitter grunting between toilet and burrito breaks. Invoking the human race for the accomplishment of 0.01% of humanity is the same as thanking God for all the "miracles" a single surgeon performs.

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I’ve worked on electron microscope designs. But I can assure you I eat burritos and have lazy weekends watching Netflix like anyone else.

While I don't expect the subway ticket clerk (example, not picking on) to actively help with the research, I do expect their taxes to indirectly help fund that research. And while the same is not true for every country/region/whatever perhaps, I wish it was.

The people converting burritos into feces serve a purpose too although it may not be as obvious

I think your point is a bit too pedantic, I also don't understand where you're coming from with your "God" comparison..

Pretty sure you're not supposed to take that literally. It's more of a comment in regards to collective human ingenuity.

You're not meant to take my comment too seriously either >;3 But I am quite serious there is rarely a "collective" human ingenuity. It's a tiny fraction of the population who have created almost anything of large scale value, at least 50% of us dine on the ingenuity of Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. Democracy is probably the best example of collective action, I'd say thats got a fairly awful record especially given some of the own goals going on in the UK and USA. Counter examples are its kind of not true scientific and engineering efforts are individuals anymore. But its certainly not the entire human race throwing down. I often dream of what would happen if we all actually leaned into solving some problems as an entire planet. I think it would look at bit more impressive!

I think you discount the value of the other 99%. Those scientists were able to commute to work because some guys with shovels made a usable roadway, some other girls worked an oil rig to extract what would become fuel, yet another group of people made the street signals, and some teenage kid with very little skill at all made them a burrito for lunch so they could get back to sciencing.

Not everyone is a brilliant scientist, but every brilliant scientist relies on the rest of the collected mass of humanity to make it through their day.

Yeah absolutely you need a society. But now you're into the realm of arguing by degree of contribution to some effort. At that point there are probably more plants, bacteria and fungi by number of individual organisms or biomass I would like to thank for my accomplishments in life. But hey who the hell thinks that way? Im almost certainly more thankful to my local trees than I am road workers in Australia living in the UK.

> But hey who the hell thinks that way?

AJ Jacobs.

https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/aj-jacobs-thanks-a-thousand...

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