Disenangling “nature.”
It is my favorite thing, but I want to know its actual value.
Is it replaceable. Is it useful. Is it morally repugnant. Is it our responsibility. Is it valuable.
“I asked my questions. And then I discovered a whole world I never knew. That’s my trouble with questions. I still don’t know how to take them back.”
Tandena Wagner
Karma: 861
Reasons why far-future civilizations may still greatly value biodiversity
This is way outside my area of expertise but here are a few thoughts:
There are strategic oil reserves in many countries for this exact reason.
There is some optional oil use, so those could reduce, while replacement fuel/power was built out.
Coal and retired coal plants exist as a stopgap.
There are some known large untapped oil reserves, I think? I believe they are much lower quality oil and so not worth extracting right now. But if the world desperately needed oil, they would be a backup option.
Afaik, this is a known weakness and there are plans and research you can read about it from humanitarian organizations, military, national preparedness, and so on.
Oil shocks have happened, so those are good ways to examine what actually happens when oil supply suddenly drops. I don’t think famines resulted, but there was serious damage? And we do have lots of other power generation online now.
I hold a lot of these same expectations. Very well written!
I think it won’t last forever, mostly because people won’t be human-singleton-minds forever. But for a while, possibly a very long while, this is probably how things will play out.
I don’t know what portion will be super persuaded into bad beliefs and what portion will be isolationist and what portion will be enlightened in our future. I’m okay with some limited extreme beliefs surviving. I hope it’s similar or better than today… But it won’t be, necessarily.
Thanks for writing this.
(Lady of Mazes is a scifi book that describes how you might have to shift your beliefs/mind in order to communicate and move between communities and that this is a difficult thing to do.)
Hi, FelixG I really enjoyed this post!
I have a poor understanding of this topic. Most of all I wish I had a clear idea of what the biggest danger is from water mismanagement. I can’t tell if it’s pollution, aquifer drainage, mismatched timing, wrong location, or something else.
I once tried to take a look at existential risks from lost ecosystem services and wrote this brief summary against it qualifying as an existential risk (I know you specifically are NOT claiming existential risk, but I think the commentary is still useful grounding):Environmental activists make it sound like we are running out of freshwater. But only 2% of watersheds use 75% of their freshwater. Data centers are not draining our water supply. To be clear, we are choosing to pump truly preposterous amounts of water out of aquifers for agriculture, and this is unsustainable and bad for the environment. But we could be far less wasteful, recycling and desalinating way more. Surface water is returned annually so we aren’t going to “run out.”
During my mini foray I was pretty shocked at how much water is being drained from aquifers. I wish I could spend some time thinking more deeply about the threats from water misuse.
As a general rule, I have found resource depletion threats tends to sound ominous, but turn out to be avoidable upon closer inspection. Resource depletion is usually hundreds of years out. And there are usually moderately more expensive alternatives which we would switch to, once we started to experience scarcity.
I would want to check on that for water bankruptcy: When would we run out. Where. Is this a new problem, or a fact of the environment. What viable solutions are there, if any.″...such system could collapse and lead to numerous cascading bad consequences. At least, to my understanding.”
I would like to see some specific examples of a water-crisis-cascade, to get an idea of how it has manifested so far.[1] Follow by some estimates of the maximum scale it could theoretically reach.
I just did a research report on vultures as an ecosystem service and got some high numbers of irreversible human health damage. So its very vivid to me right now that environmental damage can be huge, and far cheaper to avoid than to try to reverse. I could definitely see aquifer drainage as being a case of eating the seed corn and heading for worsening disasters. But I could also see it as having simple solutions and being hundreds of years away from becoming an issue, in most places.
- ^
(When I tried to do this for ecological collapse, I was shocked I couldn’t find any real-world examples of cascading collapse. Which made me update that it’s a much less likely source of unpredictable devastation.)
- ^
I’m reminded of this rather nice infographic:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pxEHC6uBzsXRdWqax/i-made-an-infographic-for-the-introduction-to-effective
Hi! From the title I thought you were offering advice. You might want to add something like “looking for/help requested” so people know to click and suggest ideas and recommend connections
Thank you! You are right of course that I didn’t include long term resilience. I was just trying to start with the most basic first-approximation “baseline minimum” assuming perfect knowledge and handpicked extinctions.
Resilience is difficult, because it is a noisy gradient, and ultimately a choice where to pin the “right amount” of stability. It co-depends on our fluctuating ability to cope with the 100-year extremes. I’m not accounting for stochastic events, tipping points, natural disasters, or 95% survival rates on 50-1000 year timelines. I’m also missing an unknown number of ecosystem services, and didn’t include supporting ecosystem services(!).
Which is why the numbers I ran would realistically be higher. I’m not sure how much higher. 10%? 50%? 2x? 10x? Even at 10x though, its still around 10-20% of species.[1]
So, to answer your question, how much changes when we include long term resilience/insurance/response diversity?
From what I’ve seen of the biodiversity x ecosystem-service-benefits, it caps out surprisingly fast. I agree that different traits result in different performance under different shocks, and that it is important to system stability. But again, I’m guessing stability caps out surprisingly fast.
Yeah. It looks like stability rises approximately linearly with log richness. You probably get most of the gains in the first handful of species. The gist is that if you halve the species, we keep 75% of the stability. 25% the species and we keep 50% of the stability.… Translating this to “required biodiversity for ecosystem services,” we should never have one species providing an ecosystem service. Any service should have a minimum 3-5 providers. For the rest, I can’t speculate what level of stability is needed. I vaguely feel losing most stability is probably acceptable, but this really demands calculating out the costs incurred and the acceptable rate of catastrophic failure. (intact ecosystems also have rates of catastrophic failure, so the increase in rate...)
Sorry to continue to be a nag, but managing ecosystems might be an easier way to increase insurance than species numbers.
Maybe I’m overfixating on gloomy estimates to be “rational.” I would love someone to show me some concrete numbers that challenge this picture.
From your first link: Within-species portfolios accounts for ~2× stability?! Huh, Des Roches et al. 2018, Raffard et al. 2019 compare intraspecific-variation effects against species-replacement effects on ecosystem functions, and within-species effects show similar magnitudes! This seems to indicate that stabilization comes from decorrelated units. Of any kind. Populations, age classes, genotypes, species, anything that delivers varying responses… Which should move some of our concern to the ongoing loss of species genetic diversity (and maybe habitat heterogeneity, shared susceptibility to natural disasters, disease, etc?)
I appreciate the pushback!
2a,b,c) Agree, people discount the long-term benefits and positive externalities of ecosystem services quite a lot!
2d) Totally, agree with this and I wasn’t adequately considering it. Its usually costly and uncharted how to reverse the loss of ecosystems. Infrastructure is a sunk cost and requires a lot to remove, and we acclimate to how things currently operate, so we wouldn’t just move back even when its strictly better.
2f) Option value: I agree. But I think it can only account for maybe 4x the species we currently value?
3.) Ah, sorry, I don’t expect to “harvest everything there is to know” about a species anytime soon. This is more about a hypothetical distant future to acknowledge that, technically, knowledge is finite and not identical to the species. This is not relevant for hundreds of years. After hundreds of years I expect we will be able to simulate/understand adaptations to climate before they happen. Like how we can semi-predict how the flu will have mutations each year, and are trying to accurately estimate the climate phenotypic plasticity of species today. We will eventually map out all the possible mutations, their likelihood, their impact on survival, and all that will remain to discover is which course history actually takes. But this is just about the far future, where we are able to easily create entire species from scratch, and things are very different. In between then and now, wild populations have lots to teach us about adaptation, behavior, climate, biochemistry, nature, ecosystems, umwelt, and imo more than we can name.- ^
I came into this expecting to show it would be around 30% of species, and ended up calculating 1%. :( I’m not confident about any of this. I’m trying to get my bearings. It’s lower than I expected. It seems clearly less than 50% of all species. It seems clearly higher than 0.2% Probably around 1-10% That seems really low. I’m more comfortable assuming 20-30% Augh.
- ^
An analogy from climate/environmentalists: development and carbon emissions are “bad” for the environment. But I don’t worry about the “bad stuff” that companies are doing. They are powering cities, inventing things, distributing goods, and generally pushing progress and making the world a better place on the dimensions they are most paying attention to. That’s their job. It’s my job to care about the bit of the world that I know about that needs fixing. So I am fine supporting the good they are doing and then spending my time combatting the bad side effects they aren’t aware of/the world needs more attention on. Roughly same principle with AI. Their job to do good AI things, your job is to fix bad AI things they aren’t doing enough for.
Things that are different for AI: AI companies might be net bad instead of net good. AI is in a different tier of urgency and xrisk.
So how does that change the calculus from the previous picture? (It might also help to think about a middle tier case like weapons manufacturing.)
Morality doesn’t exist. Welfare isn’t an objective weight. These things are fictional.
Responding to your meaning, I am bothered you are right: experiences are the only things that should have moral weight. I want to agree. But I hit some problems I can’t resolve easily:
Pursuing the world that is nothing but tiny single purpose happiness circuits, or pond scum only experiencing blissful happiness and nothing else, is an end state I cannot accept being the best outcome. The problem is things like consciousness, variety, truth, perception, concepts, are at best extraneous and get in the way of pumping out maximum utils/welfare. Delete everything → only welfare.
The way out, that I’m aware of, is either to add “quality of happiness” and suppose complex happiness is stronger than pure simplistic happiness. Or suppose some kind of saturation of similar kinds of happiness. Or that variety is some additional value.
How do you grapple with it?
Excellent job describing this clearly and accessibly. (And teaching me about Saturationism) You portray this well from where I stand on the opposite shore!
I think that truth and variety matter and would prefer to live in a universe with more truth and more variety even at the cost of “loss of perfection” or suffering[1]. Even if I could not tell the difference (unaware of deceptions) or never experienced any positive effects (from variety). I personally value these things, despite them not simplifying to additional positive valence.
Here are some values I have that don’t pan out to positive welfare:
1) I think if someone dedicates their life to some endeavor, and they are feeling the rush of emotions as their life’s project comes to an end, it would be “bad” if those exact same emotions/experience were via beaming that feeling into their mind. They cared about the project itself, they wanted it to be due to their own effort, they are not doing it for the pleasurable experience portion.
2) I think it is bad if we, with well meaning, erase[2] everyone’s memory to replay their perfect happiest possible moment over and over again for the rest of their lifetimes. I think, even if nothing could be a better world of experience for everyone, and no one will ever know it’s a lie, that this is a flawed[3] life and a flawed world.
3) [4]Someone who changes the future but doesn’t live to see it has, in some sense, a better life than someone who tried and failed, even though their felt experience is identical.
4) [4]I think it would be a shame if many things are never understood or discovered before the universe ends, regardless of how this translates to total happiness experienced.
5) I think an empty universe is bad in comparison to what it could have been, even if no one exists to prefer something else.
You cannot imagine an unwatched world without mentally watching it
Yes, but I think that if you delete the outside view then lots of things are incoherent and worse.
The badness of death disappears. We know that being dead is bad because of the outside view where they could be happily living. Same for unborn people. Accounting for past and future experiences is using an outside view, no one is actively having those experiences. Similarly, if we forcibly rewrite everyone’s desires to be something terrible, (like to desire everyone dies horribly, and then we all happily satisfy this!) this only is bad from outside.
The summing view makes arbitrary outside view choices too. Why sum? Why not only care about the single happiest life ever lived? No one experiences the sum, the lives that didn’t happen, or the future. You are asking the accountant to look at total welfare achieved out of potential welfare possible, not just total welfare and without judgement on worlds which could have existed instead. There is nothing to evaluate, without an outside view to compare against. Choosing to “add them up” instead of “average them” or “prioritize the worst-off” is a world-shape preference the accountant imposes, not something anyone experiences. You want to say the Totalist’s account is fundamental while the Saturationist’s account is doing something superficial. But the Totalist is just as arbitrarily choosing how and what to aggregate when he’s adding up experiences, and using an outside view to do it. Yes, variety across experiences is an outside view parameter, but that isn’t unusual.
Its also a little weird to assume positive welfare “exists” and “can be summed.” Maybe when you “sum” it, the redundant identical feelings overlap, occupying the space of one single unique experience, and summing it results in the Saturationist’s account. Maybe that’s just how adding up felt experiences works.Edit: The next sections I think I’m being uncharitable/shuttered in some way, but I’m not sure how.
No one proposes an ugly impersonal value.No, variety and truth are very much an ugly impersonal values. These could have very high costs and often result in a lot of suffering. All kinds of stories celebrate people who wrecked their lives forcing truth or justice into the world, or chased perfection/uniqueness (even when it doesn’t work!), which is strange behavior if these values are just about netting more pleasurable experiences. Their value did NOT evaporate when it had an net-negative-welfare cost. Sometimes we admire it as a life more well-lived, in some non-welfare sense. They had purpose instead of happiness, or something. We often hold these values dear albeit with conflicted uncertainty about what isbestandrightandmatters mostwhen it had such a terrible downside.Wedon’tcelebrate the people that are happiest and heroically help others bury their head in the sand to protect their happiness. Which would indicate that happiness is not the single final value...Ask A whether she wants to switch worlds: she is indifferent, and she must be, because if she preferred one, the welfare would not be equal. Ask B, same answer, because nothing changes for him.Turning around and sating that “this must mean the welfare wasn’t equal” is hard to respond to. Maybe its high quality welfare without being higher quantity? People do things for for results that they will never personally experience all the time. Its weird to say those values are fake.I think there are additional fundamental values beyond welfare, like variety and truth. Unfortunately I’m not sure if they can be explained further than “I value them...” so I may have to just describe them and then stop.I think I might be motte and bailey-ing. I think I’d probably retreat to variety greatly increasing welfare/valence, and be willing to confine this to only cases when it resulted in actual felt experiences at some point down the line. I may just think experiences are much greater relative to your position, when they are complex and varied experiences. We do have to come back to actual beings with actual values, (probably also being actually experienced).
I’m not so willing to accept that identical copied lives add just as much value as varied equally valenced lives.
Anyway, all this results in this belief that I have:
If we reach the world where everyone has the most perfect life, and it’s the same life, I think this world is worse than many non-identical, not-quite-perfect lives. I wouldn’t force worse lives on anyone, but I’d volunteer to live a worse life so that the universe contains something different. Normally sharing my different life would benefit others; but even if no one benefited at all and I wasted my perfection, I think I might still want to do it.
I’m open to the possibility that I’m a limited idiot who can’t see what the god-minds of the future will want. In my defense, I’m not hopelessly unimaginative. I fully expect that we will want to do currently-crazy-sounding things likes erase ourselves, limit/reshape our minds, replay experiences on loop, merge into amorphous monads, do tedious activities in deep utopia, and tons of other unimaginable things that might seem undesirable, even hideous, to me today...) The god-minds might all agree that tiling the universe with hedonium is obviously correct. Maybe I’ve just intrinsified some stuff that is a mere side-effect of promoting progress or weeding out traitors or something that will no longer apply in the grand scheme of things. But from my best attempts at imagining the god-minds at the end of the universe, I think they would value variety and truth even at the expense of some lost hedonium.- ^
I would also not maximize truth and variety at all costs.
- ^
assuming they didn’t agree to it. I expect we will choose to do this to ourselves quite a lot actually.
- ^
Maybe not a bad life compared to today’s good lives, etc. It’s an alright future. But I think its far worse than many other life-shapes and potential worlds that include variety.
- ^
I’m not entirely sure I hold this actually.
- ^
What is, “Rutger Bregman”? disagree votes made me google...
Ecological Collapse is not an Existential Risk
From this summary I don’t know what the book’s arguments are, nor what original pro-colonization arguments it is responding to. (x-risk?)
Interesting topic though, and sounds like a good book from what I can tell. Thanks for the alert and invitation to read it.
Is there a “right size” for space colonization, (one solar system, a few nearby stars, one galaxy)? Or is it basically inevitable that any space colonization is going to lead to infinite expansion?
Just wanted to say thanks for documenting this. I had no idea about the methyl bromide details. This puts a new kink in what I previously thought was a simple success story of fixing the ozone layer.
I’m psyched to see someone writing about this on the EA Forum! I think it will become really important over long time horizons, and it’s good to see attention on the precedent being set.
That being said, I don’t think the overall frame is accurate.
When value is built out of a resource and the knowledge attached to it, and both came from a particular people who were not asked and not compensated, those people have a fair claim on part of that value.
I don’t think it makes moral sense to compensate local peoples for the future usefulness of the species they live next to. It might be a practical solution to a redistribution problem, but not a great one. Think of it acting in reverse: would we compensate colonial nations for living near valuable species? Relatedly, I think the CBD was mostly making it explicit that countries can and will pull up the drawbridge on the biological value contained within their borders — not necessarily recognizing their moral due for hosting it.
Where the value comes from
Trying to attribute a given product back to a given dataset is not just hard, it is close to meaningless, and the cost of trying would swallow whatever benefit you meant to share.
I think you might have missed something here. The majority of the value does not come from the individual species or even the dataset. The majority of the value comes from the search, and from the comparison between datapoints. Most of the value doesn’t exist before the research makes sense of the data and brings value into existence. Saying it’s “meaningless” to compensate the individual data points isn’t just saying it’s hard, it’s saying the data isn’t the source of most of the value.
It’s like saying the value of a staircase comes from the rocks used to build it. The rocks were not valuable laying strewn about before. The value comes from the work of taking valueless rocks and arranging them into something useful.
The value is in the life-saving medicine. It comes from the delivery drivers, the factories, the human testing, the shelf life testing, the dosage measuring, the production line specialization, the model training, isolating the compounds, the data storage, the sequencing, and the specimen collecting (the data access). The value doesn’t just come from the species itself and its caretakers. This article makes it sound like it’s about a short “distance between … the clean lab and the muddy dig.” Indigenous knowledge that performed this search is hugely valuable as I go into a bit later. But a great deal of value comes from converting the original compound to something that can be used as a cure.
Biodiversity is not very valuable relative to the work to extract it
Bioprospecting pharmaceutical companies previously got to keep 100% of the revenue, and they stopped bioprospecting because it was not paying for itself with jackpot medicines. That said, I expect revenue for bioscience and bioprospecting to grow a lot soon, so it’s a good idea to anticipate that and set up proper regulation and compensation, potentially in the form of benefit sharing.
Nothing is being taken
“the biological material and the data taken from it leave regions that have long been marginalized, while the patents and the money stay in the North.” “the benefit taken, including future benefits, monetary and otherwise”
The species is still there and the current indigenous inhabitants were not going to start a business to produce medicine in their lifetime (they did not lose out on the IP). The species knowledge (is usually?) published and made available to them.
The communities of Madagascar got the existence of treatments for childhood leukemia and Hodgkin’s disease, and documentation on their local species. This is not valuable to them now, but it will be valuable to them in the future. (similar to the lost IP opportunity) I’m not trying to claim this is fair, just pointing out that there is some benefit flow in reverse: in the future the local people can also benefit from the public databases and medical advancements. “Future value” applies both ways.
I’m failing to get at the central issue that knowledge is highly valuable but isn’t traded in the same way as goods…
I think I’m overarguing my actual stance. To be clear, I think we should compensate for stewardship and sharing of knowledge more than we are.
Compensation for value
Indigenous knowledge is the right target for compensation: When local knowledge points at the one plant that does something, it has already done the work that costs a fortune. That is value creation, same as training the AI models. And the evidence is there too: pharmaceutical companies pursue bioprospecting when they have a lead from indigenous knowledge.
Ambiguous negotiation requirements
A flat rate is important. It avoids imposing large costs on many barely affordable public-good-generating scientific excursions. (Which I believe are a great source of un-compensated value in aggregate.) But adding ambiguous requirements about consent and fund contribution removes the benefits of a flat rate! Ambiguous requirements cause ratcheting and perpetual re-negotiations. Even though they sound free and don’t carry a price tag, they are far more costly than the fees themselves, and more costly than the extractive value gained from studying species in the vast majority of cases.
Three repurcussions from vagueness harm the people they are supposed to be providing benefit sharing to: Process costs are cheaper per project for whoever can industrialize them, so the rules favor large lawyered-up ventures over small field teams. Documented provenance becomes a liability, so the rewarded behavior is to obscure it — the honest researcher who records where a sample came from takes on an obligation that evasive one isn’t burdened by. And field sites get chosen for legal clarity, so the places with the least capacity to write clear rules get less science rather than more benefit sharing. It hits non-centralized societies the hardest: it is much harder to negotiate with a whole village than with a pre-structured bureaucratic papertrail.
This harms the people it’s meant to help
From what I understand, the majority of current benefits come from cooperation: local hiring, field assistants, researchers present and spending, species described before they’re gone, and local capacity built so a place can start doing its own research.
All of that requires researchers showing up. A lone researcher can’t be a one-person diplomatic corps in every country without a simplified published procedure for hosting an expedition, so they go somewhere that has one. The species go undescribed, and value flows less in both directions.
De-Extinction:
De-extinction is also not going to be profit generating. Colossal is about the hype of doing something for the first time; businesses won’t make money continuing to de-extinct entire species. In fact conservation stands to gain from these early hype projects, because the expensive research steps will be paved for the conservation managers who will take over the work.
Extinct species also typically have less surviving knowledge and less stewardship, so those reasons for compensation are weaker.
What I agree with
It’s hard to track who stewarded, but that doesn’t change the altruistic behaviour and the world’s benefit. Keeping species alive instead of eradicating them is costly, and that should be compensated. Probably by a fee for use of datasets? (Not for gathering and building datasets, which are community-good-generating exercise...)
Compensation for knowledge is often paid lower than its true value, and individuals/communities aren’t empowered to negotiate for its true worth. This is wrong.
There should be a transfer of wealth from rich, biodiversity-impoverished nations to poor, biodiversity-abundant nations.
Research and publication should be encouraged in far-flung, un-centralized places — it’s too hard, and it’s neglecting entire regions of the globe.
I emphatically agree we need to see what communities actually receive under a fund model, a royalty model, and no compensation at all (where lower friction might increase research and thereby local hiring, field assistants, species described before they’re gone, and local capacity built).
Forgive me for some flaws in my response, I struggled a bit with how the arguments were presented and am imperfectly attempting to disentangle some points.
I plan to make a much much more comprehensive post on this topic in couple months. But I will try to answer off the cuff right now.
Variety. People prefer to live in a world with not just the single best version of things, but many varieties of things. I think it is really important that there are other lives and other experiences happening on this earth. Not only other people, but entirely other ways of being, gestalts, perspectives, lifestyles/forms, and umwelts. More variety is better, all else equal.[1]
Eliminating a disease carrying mosquito: People value both health and variety, but health over variety. The worst diseases are a worse negative than the value of variety provided by a mosquito species existing (some conservationists contest this).
Eliminating lab rat strains: Strains of lab rats are both very similar to other lab rats and could be created again. They are not seen as a new species. People do care about losing special strains of crops/livestock and work to preserve unique breeds!
Little concern about purposefully breeding new species, or reclassifying existing ones: People do care about reclassifying existing ones, when they are aware of it happening. And fight over it a lot. Its seen as trying to find the “true definition,” at least.
I think people under-rate the value of creating new species. This is somewhat confused by what we picture. We tend to picture a new breed of livestock, which is not as different a natural species with 5+million years of accumulated differences, so it feels inferior. It doesn’t account for how different creating a new species could be, in theory. People are against creating species for other reasons like responsibility, potential bad outcomes, precedent, power, etc...
Also ending species (life) versus creating a species (life) is often considered morally unequal.
I think we also chronically under-rate the immense loss of living in a world without american camels, moas, Meiolania, passenger pigeons, Quinkana and other extinct species. Existence bias.
I think people are a little overly attached to “species” and ought to care more about the variety of traits (captured by evolutionary distinctiveness: phylum > family > genus > species > population). I think we ought to care about species in proportion to how different they are from each other, and how much of the tree of life they enact. (A sawtooth shark species matters more than another wood-warbler.)
Irreversibility. Losing something forever. We can’t re-create a species once its gone. Forever is a long time.Obviously once we gain the ability to reverse extinction, this changes the calculus. Because reversibility matters! It’s relevant that it might be impossible to reverse some extinctions, even after we can de-extinct some kinds of species.
I think saving tissue samples in biobanks (and recording everything tissue samples don’t preserve—eg life history, social transmission, gestational conditions) is REALLY important so that we don’t lose species forever!
I think one of the strongest argument for species (or my preferred evolutionary distinctiveness) comes from looking back 1000+ years from now and thinking what we will continue to value as our lives are transformed by comfort and technology. I think wildlife/nature will become increasingly valuable as human-generated wonders increasingly dominate, and even if just a few people/beings continue to appreciate the earth’s trajectory and non-human [everything, lives, stuff, processes, ways of being, the before times etc], there will be less to “go around” between them. An argument from cost disease and irreplaceability.
Speaking to your examples—“the lives of the individual sentient animals would be worth more than the aesthetic value of a collection of [the last plants on earth]” “To the crow, the number of his flockmates around the world has no bearing on the pain of his death.” For any individual (crow’s) life, what matters most is their own experience. Their life matters more than their participation in the aggregate species. (I’m saying this is true both from the collective moral worth determined by humans, and also the crow’s own perspective.) But once you are down to only a few left, and zoom out to the world scale, then their individual life’s value is dwarfed by their value as the last living member of a species. (Not to the crow, but to the human arbiters.) At least, that is the position. It’s not easy to compare across moral values like this. People stand in different places on their relative worth. I’m honestly not sure where I land either. I know I care about both. I would extinct some species to reduce global suffering, and I would choose to cause suffering to prevent some extinctions.
- ^
This isn’t a universal position. I’ve been surprised at how many people seem to desire a world filled with identical people having identical (great) lives.
EA is about the actual world and what works in those systems right now.
The parable is about fundamental morals and our grounding for those morals. The animals are right—the hummingbird is obviously impractical and useless. The story is pointing that out and holding it in tension. It’s trying to communicate that sometimes we have to do impractical and useless things.
Because you have to start somewhere on impossible problems.
Or because we want to be the person that did all they could.
Or because hope is contagious.
Or because hope is all that’s left.
Or because if everyone always asked the elephant to do things for them, then the system would break and no one would do anything. Maybe that’s what all the other animals are already doing, bringing us back to needing the hummingbird’s magic.
Lots of meaning arises from being practical versus doing what’s right. And where those diverge. And if those diverge.
Thanks for bringing it up and making me think about this again this morning.
Hi, thanks for working on this! Your post provoked some interesting thoughts. I’m interested in this topic from the biodiversity/extinction angle, so I’m not sure if I’d be a good fit. Here are some thoughts I had:
I am expecting a lot of damage from support infrastructure—power generation, data centers, transmission lines, and mining before I see direct damage from autonomous robots. This is just because AI is so information-centric right now, although autonomous machines are coming shortly.
I think the most damage would come from the increase in doing work that was too impractical before—things like spraying for pests constantly instead of a few times a year. Fishing constantly. Scanning constantly. So damage from increased disturbance and an increase in activities that were previously not done.
However, this might in some cases look worse but be better, so it seems really important to compare to what it is replacing. For example, if you spray constantly for pests, maybe you use less pesticide overall and keep populations low on your crops, without off-target pesticide drift to surrounding areas causing mass die-offs.
I’m expecting the most increase in AI activities from aerial drones because they are easily built and deployed in a wide variety of environments for a lot of activities. (Rather than androids, vehicles, or factory machine arms).
Something from the information side of things—AI unearthing, deducing, and providing more information to rare species collectors might endanger rare populations of birds/insects/plants/etc as they collect them to death to sell on the black market. Secrecy is their main mode of protection right now.
Thanks!
I disagree that step one is convincing effective altruists. Other cause areas are more important, and it’s not a priority to gather more support for nature/biodiversity. I think biodiversity/nature gets most of its value from flourishing future scenarios. Achieving those flourishing futures is far more important, and a prerequisite! Working on the greater priorities of x-risk and global health etc, should be the majority of EA’s time and effort, but still it is good to spend some time thinking about the futures that we want aim toward and eventually live in.
I think it is a better use of resources to aim the existing environmentalists to better priorities within their own stated objectives. Hence focusing on that instead of “why does biodiversity matter in the first place” in order to convince new people.
That being said, I agree that most of the philosophy and evidence for the value of biodiversity/ecosystems is not rigorous and it is a gap that sorely needs addressing. So I did finally contribute some philosophizing as to why biodiversity might be valuable. (Part of a sequence trying to properly assess the value of nature, both instrumental and intrinsic.)