Chiastic Slide

• Chiastic Slide 24 Sep 2025 20:43 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Launch­ing the $10,000 Ex­is­ten­tial Hope Meme Prize

  I agree with most folks here that this is a pretty poor allocation of resources. However, ignoring all that and thinking about the task, I would say that the ‘indomitable human spirit’ trend from a while back is probably the best example of what is being looked for. If you’re going to be forcing a meme it’s probably best to just rehash that.

• Chiastic Slide 13 Aug 2025 0:09 UTC

  4 points

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  in reply to: mal_graham🔸’s comment on: Chytrid Fun­gal In­fec­tion and Frog Welfare

  Thanks for replying! It’s encouraging to hear about these projects in the pipeline, even if attention isn’t as high as it should be generally. You’ve certainly given me plenty of reading by linking the MAF studies. I’d also be very interested in seeing your former staff’s work when public!
  
  As for lobbying states for funding, it is something that crossed my mind but I didn’t comment on it due to my unfamiliarity with the space. My security-adjacent background and cynicism makes me think you’d be more likely to have success if you sought funding on the basis of zoonotic risk. Maybe my time would be well spent looking for a precedent on this topic. An animal welfare issue that attracts the attention of states with the same scope. Would you happen to have any ideas regarding that? That being said, failing interventions at scale, I still think that smaller welfare projects are worthwhile considering the relatively low cost.

  Also, I agree that the k-strategist vs r-strategist divide is perhaps the defining issue of this field. I only hope that we survive long enough as a species with the sufficient technological and moral development to address it. But despite that, I’m inclined to say death by gradual fungal infection is a worse fate than a life lived in the wild. Accepting the former as kinder seems as if it would risk slipping into some anti-natalist thinking which I staunchly oppose. I have similar thinking when comparing insect predation to death by chytridiomycosis. If somebody has research I can read to the contrary I would love to read it. I’m still pretty new to this issue and the field at large.

• Chiastic Slide 12 Aug 2025 2:23 UTC

  4 points

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  in reply to: Fai’s comment on: Chytrid Fun­gal In­fec­tion and Frog Welfare

  Although the scale makes this seem like a gargantuan task I think that having a meaningful impact here is relatively easy. This experiment held in lab conditions used 0.0025 parts itraconazole for every liter of water. Another held in the field on tadpoles used tebuconazole at a concentration of 500 µg L^−1. Even without making habitats that concentrate frog populations and slightly reduce the cost, the price seems pretty negligible for basic disinfection. I haven’t found a figure for the salination experiments but the same goes there too. It would be great if someone with a better head on their shoulders than I ran the numbers on this, but I think with below ten volunteers and a small grant you could save 100,000+ frogs annually with good enough information on where they’re breeding and Bd hotspots. For antifungal treatments it seems that you can get away with maintenance and monitoring on a monthly basis or less, so the working hours required are trivial. Seems to me that its really a matter of organization. But with all this being said, I’m still not sure if this is the most effective approach and further research needs to be done to find a proper solution, but in the interest of reducing suffering all of this seems like it could be actioned tomorrow.

  As for getting folks to care about the issue, I think the Shrimp Welfare Project is a good model to follow. People who already have sympathies to suffering-focused ethics just need to be given a sense of scale and the ease of treatment to be driven to action. Also, It’s possible that part of Bd’s rise is due to climate change which makes humanity’s culpability in all of this an open question and might inspire a certain type of environmental activist. Plus, nobody likes animal extinction, so a focus on the most endangered species of amphibian that chytrid infection threatens could be a good way to attract attention and funding.