Thank you for doing this, very important and potentially it helps undo a mistake I made in my 20s: prioritising climate and neglecting biodiversity. (Sorry!)
I’d like to encourage this on grounds of:
A. Long-termism, life extension and ultimate value:
Climate will eventually be stabilized, but biodiversity, once lost, is gone forever*.
Certain species may have within them the compounds/RNA/DNA needed for life extension.
More prosaically, imagine if cats, coffee, chocolate and vincristine** had gone extinct before we realised we liked or needed them!
B. Beauty:
This is non trivial, even in classical utilitarianism.
Minor example: think of the pleasure we can all have from nature documentaries knowing that those animals and plants are still doing fine.
With preference utilitarianism or Maslow’s Being Values it becomes even more obvious that this matters a lot.
C. Neglectedness-within-EA (compared to climate change and non biological cause areas)
Both philosophy and IT/mathematics/computing tend to attract people with a particular group of interests. If we continue to have less attention to biological fields than AI and suffering, we’ll over time have fewer and fewer EAs with an interest in life sciences.
* especially those species we haven’t even identified! Also, gene banking or even seed/gamete banking is notoriously unreliable, so there is no sure and easy hack.
** a fungus that is the basis for many cancer treatments
I sort of agree in general, but I feel compelled to reply: A. I agree with that, except I wouldn’t miss cats that much… and we’d at least have more little birds around without these cute utility monsters. But I guess one can extrapolate your argument to dogs, too. B. I totally agree with that, and it’s the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about nature… But I suspect we should try to keep aesthetic and ethical values apart—especially because some people (including me) often prefer deserts and icy mountains to things like rain forests.
C. totally agree. I’d add: though many people work in biodiversity, I’m afraid few of them have an EA-like mentality—so they are possibly not focusing the most effective interventions (i.e., lots of low-hanging fruits around).
(B) and (C) make me think about the debate between Sax Russell and Ann Clayborne in K. S. Robinson’s Mars trilogy. The former wants to turn Mars into a planet full of exhuberant ecossystems, while the latter wants to conserve its beautyful barren landscape.
Moreover, if one considers biodiversity as valuable (per se, or because of its potential usefulness), and given that GCRs would likely harm it, then maybe one can substantially increase the expected value of GCR prevention.
Thank you for doing this, very important and potentially it helps undo a mistake I made in my 20s: prioritising climate and neglecting biodiversity. (Sorry!)
I’d like to encourage this on grounds of:
A. Long-termism, life extension and ultimate value:
Climate will eventually be stabilized, but biodiversity, once lost, is gone forever*.
Certain species may have within them the compounds/RNA/DNA needed for life extension.
More prosaically, imagine if cats, coffee, chocolate and vincristine** had gone extinct before we realised we liked or needed them!
B. Beauty:
This is non trivial, even in classical utilitarianism.
Minor example: think of the pleasure we can all have from nature documentaries knowing that those animals and plants are still doing fine.
With preference utilitarianism or Maslow’s Being Values it becomes even more obvious that this matters a lot.
C. Neglectedness-within-EA
(compared to climate change and non biological cause areas)
Both philosophy and IT/mathematics/computing tend to attract people with a particular group of interests. If we continue to have less attention to biological fields than AI and suffering, we’ll over time have fewer and fewer EAs with an interest in life sciences.
* especially those species we haven’t even identified! Also, gene banking or even seed/gamete banking is notoriously unreliable, so there is no sure and easy hack.
** a fungus that is the basis for many cancer treatments
I sort of agree in general, but I feel compelled to reply:
A. I agree with that, except I wouldn’t miss cats that much… and we’d at least have more little birds around without these cute utility monsters. But I guess one can extrapolate your argument to dogs, too.
B. I totally agree with that, and it’s the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about nature… But I suspect we should try to keep aesthetic and ethical values apart—especially because some people (including me) often prefer deserts and icy mountains to things like rain forests.
C. totally agree. I’d add: though many people work in biodiversity, I’m afraid few of them have an EA-like mentality—so they are possibly not focusing the most effective interventions (i.e., lots of low-hanging fruits around).
(B) and (C) make me think about the debate between Sax Russell and Ann Clayborne in K. S. Robinson’s Mars trilogy. The former wants to turn Mars into a planet full of exhuberant ecossystems, while the latter wants to conserve its beautyful barren landscape.
Moreover, if one considers biodiversity as valuable (per se, or because of its potential usefulness), and given that GCRs would likely harm it, then maybe one can substantially increase the expected value of GCR prevention.