The world is indifferent to people's existence. People will only ever mean something if they accomplish something, not because they're people.
Why should I, or anyone, see differently?
> What's the value of 1 bedtime story read to a child?
Well, if we could perform a large study, starting during the participants' childhood, with half the children read X bedtime stories and the other half read X-1, and could somehow control for every possible source of confounding influence across the participants' entire lifetime, then we could see whether there is a statistically-significant difference in the two groups' distributions of net worth at retirement ... then we could begin to answer that question. (In order to get a complete answer, we would need to repeat that experiment for many different values of X and fit a curve to all the results.)
Needless to say, neither you nor I will be alive when that study is published, even if we are alive when that study becomes less-than-impossible to perform.
So today we can at 2nd-best say "not enough information", and at best make a slightly-educated guess of "it's likely negligible among all other influences on children".
> We are all going to die man, life is not about money and profit.
Even if I assume so, my experience is that life utterly sucks without the freedom imbued by money (which, incidentally, is obtained via profit).
Yet I also dispute your assertion to the core. Life is most definitely all about money and profit. Because (a) whatever you think life is about ... you will invariably need money to pursue that goal, and (b) unless you're a farmer or hunter or etc., you literally cannot live without it, unless you steal, which is unethical and criminal. (Under some governments, I'll grant, it is possible to not earn one's money; so the "and profit" portion is not as applicable. Still, even in such cases, someone earned it before having it stol- uhh, taxed from them.)
Oh, and because you're making this assertion, I can also tell that you have at least some modicum of money and profits; otherwise, you would not find this assertion so easy to make.
> You seem so confident in your assessment of the value of a bedtime story. I think it's called the dunning-Kruger effect.
I wouldn't infer "so confident" from ... hmm, what phrase did I use? ... "slightly-educated". Now, I'm sorry if that diction earlier was unclear.
So let me clarify. No layperson should ever assign nontrivial confidence to their prior-expectation assessment of a question whose true answer unequivocally requires decades of research to find ... and I am no different from any other layperson in this regard.
> Have you ever read a bedtime story to a child?
Hell no. I do not yet possess even close to enough resources to support a family, let alone raise a child. Certainly you do not take me for an irresponsible fool.
But doing that wouldn't help answer the question of what is one bedtime story worth. Indeed, any single person's entire lifetime isn't long enough for that one person to get enough data points for something even resembling a confident answer.
Why should I, or anyone, see differently?
> What's the value of 1 bedtime story read to a child?
Well, if we could perform a large study, starting during the participants' childhood, with half the children read X bedtime stories and the other half read X-1, and could somehow control for every possible source of confounding influence across the participants' entire lifetime, then we could see whether there is a statistically-significant difference in the two groups' distributions of net worth at retirement ... then we could begin to answer that question. (In order to get a complete answer, we would need to repeat that experiment for many different values of X and fit a curve to all the results.)
Needless to say, neither you nor I will be alive when that study is published, even if we are alive when that study becomes less-than-impossible to perform.
So today we can at 2nd-best say "not enough information", and at best make a slightly-educated guess of "it's likely negligible among all other influences on children".
> We are all going to die man, life is not about money and profit.
Even if I assume so, my experience is that life utterly sucks without the freedom imbued by money (which, incidentally, is obtained via profit).
Yet I also dispute your assertion to the core. Life is most definitely all about money and profit. Because (a) whatever you think life is about ... you will invariably need money to pursue that goal, and (b) unless you're a farmer or hunter or etc., you literally cannot live without it, unless you steal, which is unethical and criminal. (Under some governments, I'll grant, it is possible to not earn one's money; so the "and profit" portion is not as applicable. Still, even in such cases, someone earned it before having it stol- uhh, taxed from them.)
Oh, and because you're making this assertion, I can also tell that you have at least some modicum of money and profits; otherwise, you would not find this assertion so easy to make.