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!) Can I clarify: is the topic biodiversity or mass extinction prevention? Both are valid, but strategies and timescales for both actions and outcomes could be very different.
I’d like to encourage both biodiversity protection and mass extinction prevention 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
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!) Can I clarify: is the topic biodiversity or mass extinction prevention? Both are valid, but strategies and timescales for both actions and outcomes could be very different.
I’d like to encourage both biodiversity protection and mass extinction prevention 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