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: 827
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!
As someone ignorant about development and the African context, but enthusiastic about pursuing development for all the reasons you listed: My perception is that the bottlenecks are cultural, not economic. This might be a stupid question, but are corruption and kinship culture serious problems that might undermine your efforts where you are operating?
Somewhat agreed—the psychological dimension is large across the whole world. I sort of gestured at it in my first post about the revealed preference for nature. Maybe I should have tried to estimate the combined value of premium housing near healthy ecosystems. (Hm, it would be conflated with “ocean views” and other aesthetic physical landscapes, and some of the value comes from being a positional good....)
The typical scientific justification in the vein of psychological value mostly comes down to “greenery” which could be equally provided by unnatural and low biodiversity park walks. There are some other examples like birdsong, but it’s still not evidence that biodiversity is important for our wellbeing. I admit I did a cursory check, but I feel pretty confident that it’s not good justification for the sort of global biodiversity conservation that environmentalists (like myself) value.
That’s wonderful to hear, wow. I’m surprised it provoked such a negative reaction but pleased that she enjoyed the second one!
Thank you for the words of support! So nice to hear from someone who doesn’t empathize, aha. I’m delighted.
I hope to shed light… So that environmentalists see their own position clearly, with all the giant gaps that have been glossed over. I hope to demonstrate rigor to folks who think environmental positions are all just confused & wishful thinking. I hope people who care about nature feel seen, and want to get involved in building environmentalism with EA principles. I want EAs to see it’s okay to care about nature and things that are meaningful to them, even if they aren’t the most effective or the most universal.
And most of all, for my own sake, I want to interrogate myself and reflect the real world!
(I posted my next follow-up, and would be happy if you read it.)
I know what you mean! I am trying to provide a critical approach and would like to hear what you think of how it turned out.
Nature’s value mostly doesn’t come from present-day benefits to humanity
Should forecasting receive more or less EA funding?
Mildly surprised how much is going into it. Mildly surprised how little is coming out of it. Still have high expectations for the return on improving decision-making. I’m a low information voter. Voting without factoring in a large increase in funds in the near future which would slam everything to the right.
I just came back from my first retreat and (due to unlucky events) had a pretty negative outcome. This gave me back some hope that there is something actually good out there for me yet. Thank you. Quality timing.
Total number is richness.
Buncha pedantics: The problem with that is it’s easy to add more “weedy” species to increase biodiversity per local area, even as you decrease global biodiversity. The real number is global extant species but we aren’t perfectly coordinated to know what this specific place should do best relative to what everywhere else is doing. Aaand you can’t totally re-establish density with reduced genetic diversity if it gets bad enough, but you are correct. Its the irreversible damage that is most concerning.
Thanks for noticing that! I’ll fix it.
People really care about something they call nature
Its been a week and I’ve spent some time trying to get a fuller picture of the insect welfare space. Thanks to Toby for urging me to do so.
Some things I knew previously but are worth repeating:
Evolution isn’t welfare optimizing.
Insects have different life histories than other animals. They are in bit of a different class.
Avoidance of danger is urgent so insects (probably) experience intense impulses. (aka pain and panic, even if they are otherwise very simple impulses)
Insects might be too simple for hedonic adaptation (normalizing/numbing).
Insects might experience each moment (of pain) as a discrete event. This might make painful experiences less bad (a single moment of shock), or it might make them worse (full blast isolated meaningless torture) depending on how you interpret it.
Disease.
Losing a leg would be proportionally bad to how much it reduces their survival odds.
Most of the wildlife I see and interact with is pretty happy. But most of the wildlife I see are birds/mammals/large bodied/adult/healthy/k-strategists.
It is very suspicious to me that we think that animals we understand the least are the ones we think have the most horrifying lives.
Some things I learned:
Like 10% of insects die in minutes or hours of existing. Before they have time to have positive valence experiences.
Another 10% die a bit later without getting to experience much and having probably bad experiences the whole time. (don’t take these numbers too seriously, they keep changing as I try to figure out what is going on)
Newly hatched larvae have tiny energy reserves relative to their metabolic rate, so starvation might be quicker and less devastating for insects than our default picture of starvation.
Like 20%??? of insects get consumed from the inside by parasites for long periods of time. The parasites keep them alive and eat their non-essential organs first. This seems really bad.
Insects might be more prone to fitness critical (life and death) events than other animals.
R-selection might produce different welfare profiles.
Most predation is quick. Seconds or minutes of dying. Extreme, but short. Like 50% of insect deaths are this way.
Some other thoughts:
R-strategists might have different values than us. But I’m not sure I want to act on moralities that “pain doesn’t matter” even if the uplifted insects might want that. Its a separate question than “what does our own morality say is right.”
Insects might not be morally important. This is a separate question from suffering and sentience.
Generally, the insects with more evidence for memory, sentience, creativity, intelligence, etc are also not the ones that have the worst looking lives. (?)
I have a strong instinct to think that the hedonic baseline of species is set by their lifehistory. If so, many species would experience substantial mortality and stress as normal. “Routine” portions of insect life I think would be closer to neutral baseline, even though the niche looks harsh.
Bob Fisher pointed out that the goalposts keep moving, and that makes me very uncomfortable.
If we could press a button and fix all this I would be much more likely to think that insect lives are net negative. Which does not bode well for my objectivity here. For example, I am much more likely to think “disease is bad, really bad, we should do something about that for the insects” than I am to think “r-strategists have innately horrible-shaped lives. It’s really bad. We should do something about that.” I think this reveals something.
So right now I have updated to believe that some species probably do have truly miserable welfare profiles, bad enough to be seriously consider ending their way of existence. I’m not sure how many, probably few? (I already believed that some parasites might be overall bad and we should probably end their way of existence despite their amazing intricate biology) I probably think this circumstance is a lot rarer than other insect welfare supporters. I still anchor pretty strongly to expecting insect lives to be neutral as a default, despite frequent suffering events. I probably ought to create some serious goalposts and stick to them. I still have other objections along the lines of “the insects would have different values” and “its really suspicious that we think their lives are the worst when they are the most hard to sympathize with and we understand the least about them” and “we would not apply this moral system to ourselves” and “similar/small lives matter a lot less” and “suffering is less bad than weighted, enjoyment is more readily available and better than weighted.” I am pretty strongly in support of intervening in nature to make it better, and I don’t think the precautionary principal holds up under scrutiny.
In general I am confused whether I should be thinking about suffering as a proportion of all insects, proportion of time within a species average, proportion within a life, total number of individuals, or just total bad moments.
What is, “Rutger Bregman”? disagree votes made me google...