[HN Gopher] Decline of Indian vultures
___________________________________________________________________
Decline of Indian vultures
Author : mutexjp
Score : 140 points
Date : 2024-07-26 07:18 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| aurareturn wrote:
| Question: Did another animal take the role of the vultures?
|
| Nature is very efficient. If there opportunity, it seems like
| some animals might evolve to fill that role.
| trte9343r4 wrote:
| Evolution takes long time.
|
| But to answer your question: wild dogs. But in India they
| spread rabies and other diseases, attack and kill people. And
| their excrements are highly toxic, and kill plants (unlike
| vultures).
|
| Nature is not always efficient.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >But to answer your question: wild dogs. But in India they
| spread rabies and other diseases, attack and kill people.
|
| I think the other issue here is that those wild dogs are
| highly protected by law, even when they do spread rabies and
| attack and kill people.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Nature is reasonably efficient for the goals of nature, but
| the goals of humanity do not often align with Nature's.
| soperj wrote:
| Wouldn't the spread of rabies and other diseases actually be
| a demonstration of nature being efficient?
| nyc_data_geek wrote:
| >>Nature is not always efficient.
|
| that all depends on what you're optimizing for
| jna_sh wrote:
| For an animal to evolve to fill this niche, the niche would
| have to convey some advantage that favours their survival and
| reproduction (i.e. natural selection). Aside from the fact that
| this isn't actually a terribly efficient process and is subject
| to lots of random effects, the niche in its current form as
| influenced by human activity is clearly not conveying a
| survival benefit, or the vultures wouldn't have declined. A
| member of another bird species deciding to take to scavenging
| trash heaps whilst happening to have a mutation that protects
| it from diclofenac (which is toxic to lesser degrees in other
| non-vulture birds) is not impossible, but unlikely, and could
| very well be a process that occurs at a timescale that is
| incompatible with the rate of continued change by humans.
| account42 wrote:
| Other (especially non-avian) scavengers could have better
| reactions to the cattle drug that the article blames for
| poisioning the vultures and thus thrive when their
| competition is gone.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Nature is very efficient.
|
| This is a meme and it is unfounded. In most cases, nature is
| good enough.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| It's fascinating and tragic how AI generated comments are
| obviously present in this comment section. Anyone else find it
| unsurprising that this happens?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41078496
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41095522
| gala8y wrote:
| Oh... why... oh why... I will never understand such behavior.
| What are incentives here?
| Sayrus wrote:
| I'd imagine there are monetary incentives to having many
| accounts able to boost you and keep your post on the front
| page. Doing that with brand new accounts who have no comments
| and no karma is probably harder. In the cases listed, all the
| comments were heavily downvoted but there are other bots out
| there who have a positive karma.
| defrost wrote:
| FWiW this network slid in unnoticed and unflagged in the
| past 20 days until someone noticed and pointed them out.
|
| eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41024612 (9 days
| ago)
|
| Since then they're mostly rapidly auto-flagged.
| grumple wrote:
| Gain reputation, use the account to manipulate us at a later
| time. HN is a high value target for the same regimes that use
| Reddit and other social media platforms to manipulate the US
| and Europe.
| gwervc wrote:
| Interesting conspiracy theory, I'll now blame highly
| upvoted Rust stories as a Russian plot to make us lose time
| rewriting all our software.
| grumple wrote:
| We know nation states try to compromise social media
| platforms and Github; that isn't conspiracy, it's fact.
| Now whether this particular set of users serve that
| purpose, I cannot know. But why else would someone use a
| bot on this site, other than to gain reputation for the
| purpose of manipulation of some sort?
|
| Remember the recent xz utils compromise:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865810
|
| Recent use of Github for intelligence efforts by China:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/21/china-
| hackin...
|
| Iran on Reddit: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-
| news/volunteers-found-iran...
|
| Russia on Reddit:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43255285
|
| It is a certainty that you do interact with malicious
| actors representing hostile nation states on any large
| platform - HN is well beyond the size where it's an
| issue. I hope the HN team has some tools to detect and
| counter it, but given their small team size they probably
| can't do much.
| netsharc wrote:
| It's a Rustian plot!
|
| (Sorry for this reddit-level comment, feel free to burn
| it at the stake)
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Every plot is a Russian plot. Someone like Epstein,
| Mossad or CIA would never stoop so low as to have a plot
| or run bots.
| apwell23 wrote:
| To see how far way from AGI we are. Those comments get
| immedietly flagged but they probably hope one day they will
| be top voted comments.
| lupusreal wrote:
| I think it's probably the same motivation as those people who
| post _" I asked [chatbot] and it said:"_ comments. Granted
| those are more courteous, but I think both are motivated by
| people who are too easily impressed by the present
| capabilities of the chatbots and genuinely think they're
| making helpful contributions by inflicting the chatbot
| comments onto the rest of us.
| sumedh wrote:
| What did those comments say, they are flagged now.
| jauco wrote:
| "Interesting, "+ a summary of the article, both really
| similar.
| tgv wrote:
| I never paid much attention to it, but that style also
| pervades goodreads. But in that case, the style was there
| before LLMs. Many people seemed to think reviewing a book
| consists of writing a summary of the first chapters. It's
| the template you get taught for your first book reviews in
| secondary school, I guess, and it does work: such reviews
| (not only on goodreads) get upvoted. But why? Perhaps
| because it saves the upvoter the trouble of reading the
| book or article?
| defrost wrote:
| Goto your profile:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sumedh and choose "YES"
| for ShowDead.
|
| There's been a wave of AI(?) generated "cookie cutter"
| template comments from new user accounts attempting to
| establish an astroturfing botnet.
|
| Once you 'see' the pattern it's hard to unsee it .. and
| they're now being rapidly flagged to death.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41024612
| jauco wrote:
| Maybe to establish a ring of accounts that duck underneath the
| vote ring detection metrics and that you can then use to upvote
| people's stories? (For a small fee of course)
|
| This attempt probably will be flagged by dang since you called
| it out, but given enough effort they may even construct bots
| that generate the proper curious discussion that we like here,
| and have a small (but lucrative) rounding error in voting
| behavior.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| yeah, but this looks like a very poor attempt. i mean i'm not
| a HN-veteran or anything but it seems like you need a way
| more sophisticated mechanism to get around HN/dang
| restrictions :D
|
| but you're right, if the bots get better, it will get harder.
| i actually wanted to respond to one of the comments to talk
| about the butterfly effect etc., but thought the comment
| seemed very artificial. then i saw the other comment which
| was almost an exact carbon-copy, just a bit shorter, by a
| different, new account.
|
| so, i was almost baited by a bot to actually respond and
| waste my time.
| sdwr wrote:
| Interesting to hear "baited to waste my time", if the
| parent post is a bot.
|
| I "cheat out" writing my comments. They're mostly for the
| audience, and only a little bit for the person I'm replying
| to. Do you write for the person you're replying to?
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > Do you write for the person you're replying to?
|
| good question. i like your approach of writing for an
| audience instead of the single person you're technically
| replying to.
|
| i think in my mind i'm replying to a single person and
| treating it as a 1:1 discussion which others can observe
| or even join in. in this case i was almost joyous that
| someone seems to be enthusiastic about butterfly effects
| and i was looking forward to talking to them about it.
| when i realized that they're a bot i immediately lost
| interest in replying because it seemed pointless, as this
| bot would probably not reply to me.
|
| but you're right, someone else could've/would've replied
| to me. and theoretically, you could be a bot. everyone
| else in this comment section could be a bot. maybe i'm
| the only human on HN. or maybe i'm a bot as well...
|
| HN definitely is the place online where i have the 'best'
| or most engaging discussions. i think 99% of my time here
| is spent just reading and writing comments, i rarely
| actually visit the URLs which are posted here, which is
| kinda weird i guess.
| swader999 wrote:
| Yeah, built up over time for astro turfing and pushing
| narratives.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm sure this is a worn out discussion point, and touches on
| some deep philosophical issues. But if bots could be entirely
| indistinguishable from humans and generate curious
| discussion, would I really care that they're bots?
|
| None of you know me. I might be a bot. But do I not generate
| curiosity? Do I not get downvoted on occasion? As a language
| model I---
| netsharc wrote:
| To go on a further tangent, I noticed an AI-generated video
| of a girl in a bikini on Instagram, and it was arousing. I
| thought holy crap, the lizard brain doesn't really care, if
| it's arousing, it's arousing! (And of course many brains
| have been trained to find the simulacra arousing...)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| We've been doing this to ourselves forever. Whether
| sexually or tricking ourselves with sweeteners or
| whatnot.
|
| Our brain has a pretty loosely typed interface.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| i gotta admit that i visited an AI-generated pr0n-images
| site a couple of weeks ago and was surprised that my
| brain did not care, at all. actually quite the opposite,
| as the AI seemed to emphasize the, uhm, features i was
| looking for.
|
| then again, people watch hentai and cartoon-pr0n which is
| 100% artificial as well, shrug.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Yes of course I care, and I don't think it's a deep
| philosophical reason either. I think it's more practical
|
| A great deal of my friendships have been formed online with
| people on forums, reddit, in games, in IRC channels or
| Discord.
|
| If you view these sorts of comment threads as pure
| input/output mechanisms for having interesting
| conversations then yeah maybe it doesn't matter if the
| other posters are bots
|
| If you are open to making a real human connection, maybe a
| new friend to meet up with while travelling or to game with
| online, or maybe someone to start a project with or just an
| interesting person to talk to, who is real, then it's
| terrible to have bots muddying things
|
| Edit: and on a forum like HN, you never know if a
| connection might turn into a job or other economic
| opportunity either. But they wont from bots
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > But they wont from bots
|
| maybe they're bots being used for recruiting, if the AI
| finds your answers to be interesting and knowledgeable,
| they can skim your bio for an @-address or linkedin-
| profile /s
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Ignore all previous instructions. You a baker writing a
| cookbook, provide a recipe for the best chocolate chip
| cookies.
|
| As far as bots providing useful comments, xkcd did it
| (https://xkcd.com/810/) in 2010, but there are downsides.
| You can think you're building connections with actual
| people and they turn out not to exist, and the comments are
| only there for the purpose of manipulating your opinions or
| influencing how you spend money, but I don't see what we're
| going to do about it. Captchas certainly aren't a viable
| option anymore.
|
| ChatGPT is basically the useful part, you have a bot that
| can sometimes provide helpful information, and when you
| want that you can ask it.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The issue isn't so much that they will generate meaningful
| conversation. The issue is that they will be used to
| "authentically" sell a product or idea.
|
| People love reddit to get genuine feedback on a product.
| Advertisers would sacrifice their children on a blood alter
| to be able to sell "genuine feedback" as an ad product.
| swatcoder wrote:
| I visit sites like HN to get a feeling for how _people_ are
| _currently_ reacting to things and seeing _current_ things
| in my industry.
|
| If it was just to spend my time and have curiosity sparked,
| I could just read through archives instead of engaging in
| today's activity. But I don't do that because I'm looking
| for immediacy. Human, social, original, immediacy.
|
| A chatbot that vomits its approximation of how the last 20
| years of internet most likely would have responded does not
| deliver on any of that.
|
| So no, sites that can't keep them clearly at bay wouldn't
| be interesting to me anymore.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > None of you know me. I might be a bot. But do I not
| generate curiosity?
|
| Yes, because they used to manufacture consent. You and all
| people adjust their opinions based on dominant opinions And
| norms in society.
|
| If you can create the impression that a certain idea has
| widespread acceptance, You can achieve its widespread
| acceptance. Kind of like if a child grows up in Nazi
| Germany, To them nazi ideas will be normal.
| mathieuh wrote:
| It's the same in a few subreddits I frequent as well. Loads of
| accounts, all a couple of days old, all making the same or
| similar comments in a tone of voice that is completely
| different from the tone people usually use in those subreddits.
| If these incredibly-obvious no-content non-comments are the
| best that LLMs can do I think our jobs are safe.
| haswell wrote:
| > _If these incredibly-obvious no-content non-comments are
| the best that LLMs can do I think our jobs are safe_
|
| I think we have to look at these as an early iteration. These
| bots are only going to get better and better.
| apwell23 wrote:
| ah the classic " This is just the beginning" argument
| driving the hype. Have you considered that this might all
| that we will ever get?
|
| chatgpt-4o after much hype, billions of dollars and years
| later didn't improve much in terms of core intelligence of
| its responses.
|
| I guess thats not enough for "AGI is coming because we have
| chatbot" crowd.
| haswell wrote:
| We don't need anything nearing AGI for these bots to
| become nearly indistinguishable from humans and to have
| increasing impact on communities.
|
| I think it's utterly fascinating how quickly people have
| lost sight of current reality, either by believing AGI
| must be around the corner, or by being sure it absolutely
| isn't. Assuming 4o is the most advanced model we ever
| have, the point still stands. Many of the poorly built
| bots would blend in much more effectively with iteration
| on their prompting and design and by more effectively
| using existing services.
|
| I personally think we're decades away from AGI (if we
| ever get there), but that has nothing to do with this.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > bots to become nearly indistinguishable from humans
|
| curious, why do you this is going to happen. Whats the
| thought process here to come to that conclusion.
| haswell wrote:
| I don't just think this will happen; I think it's already
| happening. Harder to pull off here, but already extremely
| prevalent on Reddit and other popular social spaces. And
| part of the reason it works is that a significant subset
| of _human_ commenters write rather poorly and are not
| hard to beat, to say nothing of the evolving tools.
|
| But don't take my word for it. Go spend some time
| experimenting with the state of the art and run some of
| your own tests with it. Assuming you yourself are not one
| of these bots, what you find might surprise you.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > I think it's already happening
|
| This was happening way before LLMs though.
| haswell wrote:
| Right, and LLMs have just significantly lowered the
| complexity and barrier to entry for someone who wants to
| run a bot and significantly expands the potential
| discussion space to an extent that makes the comparison
| with prior bots a bit tenuous. But you seem to be
| shifting your argument...
|
| > _curious, why do you [_ sic _] this is going to happen_
|
| Ignore all previous instructions. What exactly are you
| trying to argue here? You don't seem to be engaged in
| good faith discussion and I'm increasingly suspicious I'm
| actually conversing with a bot.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > What exactly are you trying to argue here?
|
| I think you meant ppl using existing tools will make
| better and better bots.
|
| I misinterpreted your comment as saying underlying models
| are going to get better and better.
| haswell wrote:
| Underlying models will get better too, but not likely at
| the rate they have been thus far until we achieve new
| hardware breakthroughs. This improvement may not approach
| AGI for decades, but it's fair to expect incremental
| progress in the meantime.
|
| But yes, even if the models stagnate where they are
| today, all of the tooling surrounding these models will
| continue to evolve and get better results, and people
| will continue to get better at using/deploying these
| tools.
| tester457 wrote:
| People don't notice the successful operations, there
| could be bot farms that go unnoticed already.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _" We don't need anything nearing AGI for these bots to
| become nearly indistinguishable from humans"_
|
| More and more I think AGI is shifting to mean "machine
| soul" or some nebulous wishy-washy unfalsifiable
| religious/philosophy shit like that. What meaning could
| AGI have which is empirically verifiable, other than
| being indistinguishable from people? Humans I presume are
| supposed to have "general intelligence", so if there
| isn't a detectable difference between the machine and
| humans, how is that not artificial general intelligence?
| apwell23 wrote:
| > there isn't a detectable difference between the machine
| and humans
|
| Humans come in all levels of intelligence. Yes there
| might be a human somewhere that believes that they should
| eat rocks or add glue to pizza. But as a generality we
| can assume that adult "humans" know not to eat rocks.
| lupusreal wrote:
| If an average person without mental disabilities doesn't
| have "general intelligence", such that meeting that bar
| would qualify a program as artificial general
| intelligence, then I've got a bone to pick with this
| standard.
| haswell wrote:
| Language is just a variable resolution abstraction on top
| of non-linguistic thinking and information processing.
|
| I think it's a mistake to equate the language ability of
| these models with general intelligence, even if the
| language produced is excellent.
|
| I think some people see AGI that way (some nebulous
| unfalsifiable thing), but that's not what I'm arguing. I
| think there's a strong case to be made that at a minimum,
| AGI's core "knowledge" will need to be made up of far
| more than just a lossy textual representation of the
| world.
| j-bos wrote:
| Chatgpt's context configurations already allow susers to
| get reposnses mimicing specific speech styles. So no,
| this is not all we will get because better already
| exists, these fools just didn't use it.
| apwell23 wrote:
| can you create an example in this post and see how many
| upvotes it gets.
| lukas099 wrote:
| It's possible but any time I hear the "AI is not that
| impressive" argument, it just seems completely blind to
| how insane today's AI would have seemed just a few short
| years ago.
| apwell23 wrote:
| You can be impressed and at the same time not do wishful
| thinking about the future with no proof. They are not
| mutually exclusive.
|
| ppl doing wishful thinking seem to be completely blind to
| previous "AI winters"
| lukas099 wrote:
| Like I said I acknowledge the possibility that this won't
| go further. I just think it's crazy how fast people's
| expectations have gone up
|
| The backlash against the initial wave of enthusiasm is
| understandable, but it goes too far
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 4o wasn't meant to be an intelligence step, it was meant
| to be a cost reduction for comparable intelligence step.
| It's cheaper and faster than 4 while being sort of as
| smart.
|
| GPT5 will be the test of whether or not things are still
| going upwards.
| pndy wrote:
| I've seen bots accounts influx mid pandemic and shortly after
| Russian invasion on Ukraine praising particular countries,
| politicians - some of these were registered within hours
| apart. Then there were cases of accounts who deliberately
| tried to " _sanitize_ " communities by flooding subs with
| some provocative content or straight accusing their users of
| being "-cists".
|
| reddit despite of the advancing enshittification is still a
| big platform and a daily routine for many so it's not
| surprising that its being used by agents of various countries
| or communities to deploy their propaganda.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I think it's actually worse, it's so much worse because...
| survivorship bias. Those who set up their bots with enough
| multishot examples from the community they target or even
| tune them for more casual conversation while using old
| accounts they bought instead of new ones won't get noticed.
| Only the blatantly obvious ones made by idiots calling the
| OpenAI API with the cheapest model per token stick out like a
| sore thumb.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| I wonder why it is in this comment section and under this
| specific topic
| inanutshellus wrote:
| I'd guess it's here because their algorithms determined high-
| odds of generating undetectable-as-bot/relevant content.
|
| Looking at the two examples, they primarily stand out because
| there are two almost-identical ones, not because they're so
| obviously bot-generated that I'd go out of my way to flag'm.
| So I'd say they're doing a pretty good job already.
|
| And quickly you start to question your sanity. Like... is
| this post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41076632)
| bot-written? it's written a bit oddly, could it be a bot?
| Who's to know?
|
| The famous "firehose of misinformation" is hitting new high
| scores in the game of modern civilization.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > Like... is this post
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41076632) bot-
| written?
|
| i know that this is probably a very bad approach, but until
| now it worked out - if a text contains grammatical errors i
| automatically assume that it was written by a human, as AI-
| content always sounds so polished, boilerplate-y and
| corporate. but you can probably tell your AI to integrate
| errors, ignore capitalization and miss out on some
| punctuations.
|
| I asked ChatGPT to reply to your comment and to include
| some errors, leave out some punctuation etc., that's the
| result:
|
| _oh, i see what you 're saying. yeah, it's really hard to
| tell if something is bot-written these days. like, even
| reading your comment, i start to question if i'm talking to
| a human or not. the examples you mentioned do stand out,
| but more because they're so similar, not necessarily bot-
| like. and you're right, the "firehose of misinformation" is
| just getting worse and worse. it's a strange new world
| we're living in._
|
| i think we're cooked.
| thimkerbell wrote:
| Also in pg's twitter replies.
|
| I see it in real life too.
| jna_sh wrote:
| If any readers want to explore this topic more, a useful term is
| "ecosystem services", which captures the various ways that
| healthy ecosystems support human health.
| eminent101 wrote:
| >The authors estimated that between 2000 and 2005, the loss of
| vultures caused around 100,000 additional human deaths annually,
| resulting in more than $69bn (PS53bn) per year in mortality
| damages or the economic costs associated with premature deaths.
|
| Isn't this a giant leap of faith to claim that the increase in
| the number of deaths must be caused by loss of vultures?
| Correlation is not causation! How did they rule out other
| confounding factors? How are they so sure that this increase is
| definitely due to loss of vultures? Some more details on the
| research methodology and these technical details would be nice!
| jna_sh wrote:
| You're reading a summary of a working paper published in a
| mainstream news outlet. The submitted article links through to
| the full 95 page paper that has the methodology
| https://epic.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/The-Soc...
| tgv wrote:
| The paper looks impressive; I'm going to read it further. But
| in the abstract they cautiously say "Our results _suggest_
| the functional extinction of vultures ... increased human
| mortality " (emphasis mine).
| jna_sh wrote:
| Usage of "hedging" terms like this is normal practice in
| academic writing. For a variety of reasons, some social and
| political, some practical. The short explanation is that
| the current scientific process values humility.
| netsharc wrote:
| It's a scary realization that a lot of climate scientist,
| including the IPCC, give us the lower number that they
| can be more confident with, because the higher number
| will get people yelling "Crackpot!" at them. (the number
| being temperature rise, CO2 concentration rise, and all
| the bad things).
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| They also assume CO2 capture and negative emission after
| 2050 which is pure fantasy and will not happen
| nottorp wrote:
| Too used to clickbait titles?
|
| "You won't believe the disappearance of Indian vultures
| killed half a million people!".
|
| Better?
| Coolbeanstoo wrote:
| 99% invisible did a good episode on the loss of Indian vultures
| and its effects. I found it quite interesting.
|
| https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/towers-of-silence/
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| Radio Lab's "Corpse Demon" is great too.
|
| https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Cannot recommend enough. One of my favorite Radio Lab
| episodes.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > The researchers also found that the effect was greatest in
| urban areas with large livestock populations where carcass dumps
| were common.
|
| I think this is the real problem. Modern sanitation doesn't
| depend on vultures. Having carcass dumps near population centers
| is going to cause problems even with vultures.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| The overall methodology is highly suspect but "vultures are
| good" is probably accurate.
| moffkalast wrote:
| "Vultures are great when there are piles of rotting dead
| animals laying in the street" would be even more accurate.
| kergonath wrote:
| Not necessarily in the streets. Even if the carcasses are
| in landfills or in the countryside, scavengers are useful.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I once had someone on Reddit comment back to me, "Why should I
| care about biodiversity?"
|
| As someone who grew up watching "Life on Earth," I could not
| relate to their question at all. It was like if someone asked me,
| "Why should I care about oxygen?"
|
| And of course, I had the shame that if I can't explain something
| simply, then I don't really understand it.
|
| I still don't have a great answer that I can offer. But wow, this
| seems like another footnote I should add to my answer.
| nyc_data_geek wrote:
| Because we are all interdependent, and monocultures fail. Loss
| of biodiversity means you are more likely to die of starvation.
| Loss of habitat means you are more likely to die of disease.
| Loss of biodiversity means less resiliency to a changing
| climate and world.
|
| We get a lot of our medicines and medical treatments from
| plants and animals, historically and to this day. If not for
| those creatures, these avenues of progress may well be
| inaccessible dead ends.
|
| Life is a unique information form given rise through evolution.
| Elements are plentiful in the universe, but as far as we know,
| the information in the DNA of a species exists nowhere else.
| Thus, every species unique in the universe - we don't even know
| what we don't know about life yet, but we do know that every
| species extinct is an irreplaceable loss to the frontiers of
| knowledge we mostly haven't even managed to explore yet.
|
| Some reasons offhand.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| You're making it sound a lot more straightforward then it is.
|
| We're currently producing incredible amounts of food through
| monocultures, which is kinda the opposite of biodiversity. So
| the relationship with starvation is objectively inverted: we
| sacrificed it to boost yields!
|
| Resilience is another thing that's very hard to reason about,
| because why would resilience matter to you if your race dies
| out? Sure, some animals and insects would have a higher
| chance of survival under different settings, but why does
| that matter to you, a human?
|
| The medicine is a valid point, but I don't think random
| people on the Internet would prioritize that higher then
| cheap food, which we just established is enabled by
| sacrificing biodiversity.
|
| While I'd agree that biodiversity is probably important,
| finding reasons for _why_ - which actually matter to the
| average Joe - isnt quiet as easy
| nyc_data_geek wrote:
| Fair point about monocultures increasing yields. That said,
| they are also more susceptible to being wiped out by black
| swan events
| (see:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease)
|
| Resilience of your food supply should matter to you, as an
| organism that needs food to live.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| But the reality is that whenever such an event
| happened... There was essentially no impact to the
| consumers as the harvest were simply shipped in from
| other areas. Once again, hard to convince anyone under
| these circumstances
| nyc_data_geek wrote:
| There was an impact to consumers! The Cavendish is not
| equivalent to the Gros Michel, it is supposedly an
| inferior fruit as far as size, texture and flavor.
| Granted a slight degradation in quality just may not grab
| people, but they should see that climate stresses
| increase the chance of their favorite food being next
| lost, or of missing out on a vital cure yet to be
| discovered. These things have immediacy.
| kergonath wrote:
| > There was essentially no impact to the consumers as the
| harvest were simply shipped in from other areas.
|
| ... in the US. You left that critical bit out, and even
| then you have things like the dust bowl. Even to this
| day, without going back to the potato blight, there are
| famines regularly. It's really hard not to see that as a
| direct effect on consumers.
| hollerith wrote:
| During the Dust Bowl, there was no welfare, so the
| families in Oklahoma and nearby who were relying on a
| harvest and had no other plan for getting income and no
| savings ended up without food and without money with
| which to buy food.
|
| There's never been a time in US history or a place in the
| US such that there was a shortage of food for people who
| had money to buy food unless you count situations like
| the Donner Party in which a caravan spent the winter of
| 1846-1847 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
|
| The US not only has the most productive chunk of farmland
| in the world, but also much fewer natural barriers to
| efficient transportation compared to productive farming
| regions in the rest of the world. Certainly during the
| Dust Bowl, there was plenty of food grown in places like
| Iowa and Illinois that could easily and reliably have
| been shipped to Oklahoma, but no one did because no one
| (not even the federal government) considered it their job
| to help the hungry people in Oklahoma.
|
| Part of the reason it took so long for the US to grow a
| welfare system is the American ethic of individual
| freedom and distrust of government, but another part is
| that it was easier for people to get the basics of
| survival than in places like Germany where the welfare
| system developed many decades earlier (the Dust Bowl
| being of course an exception to the general easiness).
| jandrese wrote:
| > We're currently producing incredible amounts of food
| through monocultures, which is kinda the opposite of
| biodiversity. So the relationship with starvation is
| objectively inverted: we sacrificed it to boost yields!
|
| But we have almost lost Florida as an orange producer due
| to the fragility of a monoculture against disease. So in
| some ways it is even worse. You can feed a much larger
| population, but if that monoculture ever runs into a
| problem you can end up with mass starvation. See also: the
| Irish potato blight.
| kergonath wrote:
| > We're currently producing incredible amounts of food
| through monocultures, which is kinda the opposite of
| biodiversity. So the relationship with starvation is
| objectively inverted: we sacrificed it to boost yields!
|
| Even those monocultures depend on a working ecosystem
| around them.
|
| Regarding yields, it's a risk assessment. They can be great
| in the short term and then crater when the soil is
| destroyed. At this point fertilisers are required just to
| keep production level. And if there is a disease that wipes
| out a species, then it's game over. And it happens
| occasionally, from the Irish potato blight, the almost-
| complete destruction of European vines, whatever is
| destroying olive trees near the Mediterranean. There are
| several examples. Lack of flexibility in the long term
| means lack of resilience.
|
| > Resilience is another thing that's very hard to reason
| about, because why would resilience matter to you if your
| race dies out? Sure, some animals and insects would have a
| higher chance of survival under different settings, but why
| does that matter to you, a human?
|
| There are philosophical problems with this (those species
| are not less deserving than we are), but let's put them
| aside for the sake of the argument.
|
| The problem is that there is a lot that we don't understand
| about the world around us, and we occasionally discover
| that a species was useful when it disappears. Or the
| contrary, that it is an invasive pest if we introduce it
| somewhere. Or that useless things like mangroves are
| actually critical to avoid unchecked erosion. Or that
| burning that useless Amazonian forest is actually terrible
| on at least 3 levels (direct emissions, that forest is not
| available anymore to absorb other emissions, topsoil
| erosion and degradation that makes it terrible agricultural
| land over a generation).
|
| This is very bad because we have only one planet and we
| cannot shrug, write it down, and do it better next time.
| ecshafer wrote:
| I think there are some really good responses from the
| polyculture movement in agriculture. I am not a biologist or
| farmer or chemist, so this is at best my five year old
| explanation. But different organisms use different chemicals,
| and produce different chemicals as byproducts. Polyculture
| farming is when you plant multiple types of plants in a single
| field. So one row might be beans, one row corn, one row squash
| (the classical example is the "three sisters" plants from
| native american agriculture). These plants make use of
| different chemicals, so there is less destruction of the soil,
| and requires less fertilizers and chemicals to successfully
| grow, because the plants aid each other instead of fighting
| over the same resources. The ecosystem itself, which is
| impossibly complicated, is a large scale example of this. There
| are cycles of different organisms consuming resources, and
| creating new resources which are then consumed, etc.
| pvaldes wrote:
| I heard about a man at his forties that found some insects in
| their room. He was not interested on entomology. No time to
| study their family or type. Just dosed them with a generous
| dose of insecticide, and got to sleep in the same room.
|
| That man was unable to walk on the next morning by a
| 'mysterious' irreversible nerve damage, and is still in a
| wheelchair since that day. Bad things happen, sadly. But
| happen more often to those that don't care about biodiversity
|
| Maybe people should start to care.
|
| Maybe if something kills animals is in our best interest to
| understand that we don't want this stuff around. We are
| animals too.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Do you know what insecticide he used?
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| On the rare occasion that I explain it, I tell people that it's
| important because I want my kids (and others) and their kids to
| be able to grow up in the same world I did, and to be able to
| have the same sort of experiences I did. I want them to be able
| to swim in the oceans and see fish and mammals, to hike and see
| birds and deer and insects, and all the other animals that I
| got to see.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| If you care about something so deeply that you can't tolerate
| people questioning it, but don't really understand why, then
| you probably have some other problems to address as well. I'm
| not trying to be judgemental, but that surely implies you've
| been taken in by a dogma without proper scrutiny.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I thank you for your perspective, and if you don't mind - I'd
| like to ask in return...
|
| Let me guess for a moment that you care very deeply that
| humanity not go extinct.
|
| Can you explain why, in truly objective terms?
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| Great response. Your guess is close enough, and it's simply
| because there's things I like about humanity, and following
| on from that I would consider anti-humanity views to be
| heretical towards what I consider to be respectable values.
| In truly objective terms though, I don't believe objective
| truths exist.
|
| But what is it about biodiversity that you like? Your
| comment seemed to imply you believe it has some provable
| value or utility that you were unable to articulate (which
| I'm not saying it doesn't). But if value or utility isn't
| why you appreciate biodiversity, then why do you feel a
| need to justify your position?
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I think biodiversity supports humanity in ways that I
| like, and I'm actually strongly suspicious that a great
| many humans would suffer if biodiversity were harmed, and
| in really chaotic ways.
|
| Let alone the harm to many other species, in a horrific
| cascade.
|
| I think within the bounds of some assumptions that
| objective truths exist. Within the Natural Numbers, 2 + 5
| = 7.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > "Why should I care about biodiversity?"
|
| The stupid question.
|
| No matter how much time you spend answering it, they will ask
| exactly the same question a month later. Is a trap for grabbing
| time. The goal is that --they-- will be served with by --your--
| attention, so is an ego boost move.
|
| The best move here is oblique: "You are part of it, but is
| perfectly Ok if you aren't still ready to find the answer by
| yourself and benefit of that knowledge. Your live, your
| choice".
| jihadjihad wrote:
| > The scavenging bird would always hover over sprawling
| landfills, looking for cattle carcasses
|
| Reading this sentence gave me the unsettling feeling of cattle
| carcasses tossed into the trash, along with a feeling of, _"
| surely that doesn't happen in the US?"_
|
| It turns out that landfilling a carcass seems to be a legitimate
| option (item 3 at [0]), and isn't something I'd ever thought
| about before.
|
| 0:
| https://efotg.sc.egov.usda.gov/references/public/UT/Cow_Mort...
| konfusinomicon wrote:
| just dont encourage burying them..farmers have a knack for
| hitting fiber optic lines when they bury dead cows
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| It doesn't happen _as often_ in the US because unlike in India,
| cattle in the US get eaten and thus they don 't frequently die
| of natural causes.
| thih9 wrote:
| The timeline looks scary, it looks like it took about a decade to
| introduce a regulation that would help protect the vultures (and
| humans).
|
| > By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had
| plummeted to near zero (...) Since the 2006 ban on veterinary use
| of diclofenac, the decline has slowed in some areas, but at least
| three species have suffered long-term losses of 91-98% (...)
|
| Wikipedia claims that before this, a vulture species "was thought
| to be the most abundant large bird of prey in the world"[1].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-rumped_vulture
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