in terms of eco system redesign my friend raised the point that there are A LOT of animals in the wild and how are we supposed to manufacture contraceptive for all the predators (from what ive read this is what david pearce advocates, please tell me if im wrong). is this reall a feasible option? perhaps it will be possible in the future but not now? any information is very much appriciated thanks

apart from that theres destroying nature which i dont like at all.

anything else?

I'm much more pessimistic than Dave about ecosystem intervention, because it seems that even if we could do it, we could only feasibly help the big animals with our current technology. But the whole reason that the wild-animal issue is overwhelmingly important is that it affects vast numbers of small animals. (If it's just about helping big animals, we may as well focus on factory-farm animal welfare, humane slaughter, etc., where the situation is much more controlled.)

IMO, in order for humans to help the masses of small fish, insects, and such (without merely preventing their existence), we would need AI and lots of small robots.

That said, enabling technology to help wild animals is only part of why it's important to raise concern for animal suffering. The other part -- perhaps more important -- is to make sure people think twice before increasing wild suffering through terraforming, directed panspermia, sentient simulations, and lab universes. The amount of suffering created in these ways could dwarf that presently on earth.

(This raises the question: If you don't like the idea of destroying nature, do you also not like the idea of failing to spread nature? Or is there an asymmetry? Similar to the way that most people think it's wrong to kill an infant but not wrong not to create an infant.)

If you destroy nature, you can't change your mind if you find out you were wrong.

That raises the question: how much nature can we safely destroy?

Biodiversity is generally viewed as an important source of scientific discovery. For that reason alone, it might be worth keeping it as intact as possible for now, given the cumulative benefits of science.

What exactly is it they're discovering?

I don't have any background knowledge, but Wikipedia has a passable section on its benefits to humans.

The most important sounding is the subsection on human health:

Wikipedia wrote:Biodiversity's relevance to human health is becoming an international political issue, as scientific evidence builds on the global health implications of biodiversity loss.[44][45][46] This issue is closely linked with the issue of climate change,[47] as many of the anticipated health risks of climate change are associated with changes in biodiversity (e.g. changes in populations and distribution of disease vectors, scarcity of fresh water, impacts on agricultural biodiversity and food resources etc.) Some of the health issues influenced by biodiversity include dietary health and nutrition security, infectious disease, medical science and medicinal resources, social and psychological health.[48] Biodiversity is also known to have an important role in reducing disaster risk, and in post-disaster relief and recovery efforts.[49][50]

Biodiversity provides critical support for drug discovery and the availability of medicinal resources.[51] A significant proportion of drugs are derived, directly or indirectly, from biological sources: at least 50% of the pharmaceutical compounds on the US market are derived from plants, animals, and micro-organisms, while about 80% of the world population depends on medicines from nature (used in either modern or traditional medical practice) for primary healthcare.[45] Only a tiny fraction of wild species has been investigated for medical potential. Biodiversity has been critical to advances throughout the field of bionics. Evidence from market analysis and biodiversity science indicates that the decline in output from the pharmaceutical sector since the mid-1980s can be attributed to a move away from natural product exploration ("bioprospecting") in favor of genomics and synthetic chemistry; meanwhile, natural products have a long history of supporting significant economic and health innovation.[52][53] Marine ecosystems are particularly important,[54] although inappropriate bioprospecting can increase biodiversity loss, as well as violating the laws of the communities and states from which the resources are taken.[55][56][57] Higher biodiversity also limits the spread of infectious diseases as many different species act as buffers to them.[58]

Hi all.

Ruairi wrote:in terms of eco system redesign my friend raised the point that there are A LOT of animals in the wild and how are we supposed to manufacture contraceptive for all the predators (from what ive read this is what david pearce advocates, please tell me if im wrong). is this reall a feasible option? perhaps it will be possible in the future but not now? any information is very much appriciated thanks

I think there is a problem with the term "abolition". When someone speaks about "abolition of wild animal suffering", he seems to suggest this is an "all or nothing" issue. So I prefer to speak about "reduction of wild animal suffering".

Arepo wrote:I don't have any background knowledge, but Wikipedia has a passable section on its benefits to humans.

It's true that biodiversity have benefits to humans. But this isn't enough to conclude that biodiversity is a good thing. I guess there is a lot of disvalue on the wild, more than value produced by biodiversity to humans.

Someone can argue that scientific discovery caused by dioversity can produce a lot of more global happiness than suffering that happens in the wild, but it isn't obvious. I think we must look for sources of scientific discovery that doesn't suppose so much suffering.

I'm not claiming anything with any confidence, just offering what I think is an important consideration. If you accept these premises then it could be crucial:

1) Biodiversity is likely to be a source of future technological innovation - to the extent that more biodiversity means a higher expected rate of scientific in the foreseeable future
2) The feedback effect of technology will continue - ie. the better our technology is at any given point, the faster we should expect it to progress. So (if you also accept 1), preserving biodiversity now will give us compound interest in technology later.
3) Scientific progress tends to increase happiness (or whatever quantity/ies you think valuable)
4i) There is a high chance we'll have descendants around who stand to benefit from the increased happiness science provides long enough for it to outweigh the suffering in nature... or
4ii) There's a faintly plausible chance of a sentient population explosion of the scale Bostrom talks about in Astronomical Waste, such that even the small chance is high enough to push expected utility from the compound interest through the roof... or
4iii) Some scenario between i and ii is likely enough that, with the same reasoning, expected utility from the compound interest outweighs negative utility from preserving it.

Clearly there's plenty of room for uncertainty in each of those points, but if accurate they have the potential to show that preserving biodiversity now gives massively higher utility than getting rid of it, no matter how unpleasant nature is. And as Daniel said, preserving it gives us room to rectify our decision. Destroying it doesn't.

It's also far from clear which way nature tends. I don't know about anyone else, but I find - important caveat, when I'm not suffering due to it - that being out in a natural environment is much more pleasurable on an instinctual level than being in almost any urban environment. So while a lot of unpleasant stuff happens out there, using a rather weak sample of me, I can infer that it's default happiness level is rather higher than our collective default as a primarily urban species.

I've also said elsewhere that when we're talking about deliberate destructive intervention, we might think case by case. Perhaps all (or almost all predation) is so nasty that it overwhelms all positive benefit from life, but it seems pretty clear that some predators are much nastier than the norm. So perhaps we could try to kill them off rather than wiping out whole ecosystems. Presumably some predation must be less nasty than average (this? Depending on what the method turns out to be), though that information is less likely to be relevant to us.

anyone have any other comment to make on the feasibility of eco system redesign?

i dont like the idea of destroying nature because i really dont see any evidence that life there is that bad, in general when you suffer, you suffer briefly and then you're dead.

Infeasible any time in the near future. Enabling technologies to be able to actually re-design eco-systems that would contain less suffering and would last for a while would seem to be: powerful supercomputers, molecular nanotechnology, robotics and possibly advanced AI. And of course, tech isn't the only thing, motivation is also required.

We'd also need a better understanding of how ecosystems fit together than we already do, to the point where we'd be able to say, "okay so if we remove species A and replace it with species B, species X and Z will experience less suffering and the ecosystem will continue on much the same."

With current tech and levels of motivation, any decrease in animal suffering due to humans is likely to be unintentional. Whilst we could probably achieve some sort of reduction in suffering in wildlife reserves (contraception, due to virus or chemicals, culling of animals, extinction of certain predators) this would take a lot of effort, that society isn't willing to give and that I don't think utilitarians should fund.

So basically, we're just waiting on future technologies (and attitude changes) to make nature a nice place to live (this all assumes that on balance it isn't).

On biodiversity, I doubt we're going to be listened to about nature for a few decades at least, so we may as well profit from the suffering (it sounds horrible, but if it's going to happen anyway...)

Gedusa wrote:So basically, we're just waiting on future technologies (and attitude changes) to make nature a nice place to live (this all assumes that on balance it isn't).

this is the conclusion i was coming to, it think its not really a utilitarian thing to put resources into, expect making the idea more popular on blogs, etc

Gedusa wrote:We'd also need a better understanding of how ecosystems fit together than we already do, to the point where we'd be able to say, "okay so if we remove species A and replace it with species B, species X and Z will experience less suffering and the ecosystem will continue on much the same."

I think this is slightly too pessimistic. It's essentially highlighting the uncertainty involved which, as with any action we take, is huge. But - as with any other action - if we have no reason to think there's a negative expectation beyond our initial gain, then uncertainty in itself is largely irrelevant. We still have a positive expectation net if we have a positive expectation at the the start then neutral expectation later on.

What high uncertainty can often do is show that, rather than making choice a or b, we might have better expectation from taking option c - more research into the long-term effects of a and b, *then* choosing one of them. But research isn't a panacea - if we don't have reasonable expectations of it telling anything useful, then we're just wasting time and resources. In this case - if the pessimistic view that we won't be able to predict ecosystem behaviour for decades is true, then - any other considerations aside, which might be too strong a caveat - we might do best to make decisions now on our limited information.

In which case, see my last comment - it seems like the best way to start if we were going to act would be to identify the most painful predators and get rid of/reengineer them. Other predators could and probably would evolve to take their place, but there's a good chance (given that the ones we're selecting are, by definition, seemingly less likely to evolve by virtue of being worse than average) they'd be more humane killers.

Ruairi wrote:i dont like the idea of destroying nature because i really dont see any evidence that life there is that bad, in general when you suffer, you suffer briefly and then you're dead.

I would think that deaths from starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, parasitic infection etc. are relatively slow and unpleasant processes that occur relatively often in nature.

@Arepo Okay, I agree that removing the most painful predators would probably increase overall utility. I also agree that we might to well to start now rather than do research, as this sort of research is unlikely to pay off any time in the near future. However, I don't think we should be investing in this area as gains are too low and costs too high, so the whole point is pretty much moot.

Gedusa wrote:So basically, we're just waiting on future technologies (and attitude changes) to make nature a nice place to live (this all assumes that on balance it isn't).

These technologies would be important even if nature is "a nice place to live" on balance. Even if wild lives contain more happiness than suffering, they still clearly contain a lot of suffering!

Arepo wrote:We still have a positive expectation net if we have a positive expectation at the the start then neutral expectation later on.

Just wanted to say thank you for neatly summing up my response to the objection to utilitarianism that you can't fully predict the consequences of an action - I've always wondered how to put it nicely into words.

The benefits of biodiversity seem to largely be about plants. The problems with a lot of wildlife is about animals. Why not kill a lot of the animals, but leave the plants?

DanielLC wrote:The benefits of biodiversity seem to largely be about plants. The problems with a lot of wildlife is about animals. Why not kill a lot of the animals, but leave the plants?

Do ecosystems really work that way? It seems like a safe bet that animal and plant populations strongly affect each other.

LadyMorgana wrote:Just wanted to say thank you for neatly summing up my response to the objection to utilitarianism that you can't fully predict the consequences of an action - I've always wondered how to put it nicely into words.

In any case that always seemed a fatuous objection to me - a) we're happy to pursue our own goals despite the uncertainty, so why should it suddenly become a problem just because we're talking about someone else's goals, and b) it's a complete wimp-out of an objection, another version of the 'oh, but it's too hard' complaint. Predicting the weather is hard, but that doesn't give us reason to give up trying to do it. Why is any other aspect of the future different?

Do ecosystems really work that way? It seems like a safe bet that animal and plant populations strongly affect each other.

You obviously can't kill all of the animals. For example, you'd need insects to pollinate the plants. I think you could still decrease animal populations okay, and get rid of the larger ones. The plant populations will be affected, but as long as they survive and adapt to the decrease in animals, you'll be fine.

DanielLC wrote:If you destroy nature, you can't change your mind if you find out you were wrong.

That raises the question: how much nature can we safely destroy?

Daniel Dorado wrote:Someone can argue that scientific discovery caused by dioversity can produce a lot of more global happiness than suffering that happens in the wild, but it isn't obvious.

Good reasons not to destroy nature. Also potentially good reasons to make sure that nature is never destroyed or even expanded as much as possible? I'm thinking wider than scientific discovery caused by biodiversity now - discovery caused by life (life -> humans -> knowledge). This is all very relevant to x-risk.

To start with, I thought it would be a good thing if the world ended, because there's probably more suffering in it. Then I thought about not being able to change your mind if you're wrong, and the value of waiting to get more information, implying that we should reduce x-risks. But perhaps we should take it one step further - the arguments that support reducing x-risk on earth also support terraforming, lab universes etc. - the potential net suffering is outweighed by the potential gains in knowledge.

But then where do you stop? Even if you're 99% sure that the world has 1 000 000 x more suffering than happiness, the argument still stands that you should wait to get more knowledge about the issue because the potential losses are so great if you're wrong and do blow up the world (an untold number of future positive lives lost). This seems suspicious to me. Like that thought experiment where God offers a man two days in heaven for one day in hell every day, but he has to spend the day in hell first.

(Sorry if this is confusingly written, I'm basically thinking aloud and recording it.)

Arepo wrote:It's also far from clear which way nature tends.

Jasper Sky gave me some interesting thoughts recently on this topic: Adrenalin drastically reduces suffering. To be paralysed into inaction by suffering when in danger is detrimental from an evolutionary perspective, you need a large amount of focus to escape the danger (though extreme suffering once out of danger makes sense, as a deterrent). So prey pursued by predators probably aren't suffering as much as we first assume. And half the time when disease/injury/weakness through starvation etc. leads to death it's indirectly - it makes them easy prey.

LadyMorgana wrote:But then where do you stop? Even if you're 99% sure that the world has 1 000 000 x more suffering than happiness, the argument still stands that you should wait to get more knowledge about the issue because the potential losses are so great if you're wrong and do blow up the world (an untold number of future positive lives lost).

As we've discussed, my concern with the knowledge argument is about whose knowledge it is. If we're talking about, say, my extrapolated self, then I think this would be right (up to a point). But

1. most humans disagree with me about values, some of them very drastically (like Christian / Islamic fundamentalists), and
2. it seems to me unlikely that human values will even control the future of intelligence on earth. In other words, reducing existential risk has the primary effect of increasing the chance of a non-human-like organism taking over our galaxy.

Either way, we're left unable to act upon our knowledge, even if we have time to acquire it.

To put it another way, reducing existential risk has this calculation:

(A) (99%) * (some massive outcome we can't control) + (1%) * (we can act upon the knowledge we gain from waiting).

Since we have bigger influence over things now, the calculation might be more like

(B) (90%) * (some massive outcome we can't control) + (10%) * (we can act upon the knowledge we have now).

In order for (A) to be bigger than (B), it would (roughly) have to be the case that the action we can control in (A) is 10 times better than the one we would take in (B). [Note: I haven't thought about this for more than 5 minutes, so I'm not sure my equations make total sense.]

I guess there's standard decision theory about diminishing expected value of information, explore-exploit tradeoffs, etc.

LadyMorgana wrote:This seems suspicious to me. Like that thought experiment where God offers a man two days in heaven for one day in hell every day, but he has to spend the day in hell first.

Yes, I know what you mean. Redolent also of the "paradox of the indefinitely postponed splurge."

LadyMorgana wrote:Jasper Sky gave me some interesting thoughts recently on this topic: Adrenalin drastically reduces suffering.

Good point. See also "Endorphins" on p. 8 here. Additionally, it's comforting to think that the hedonic treadmill can work in reverse.

LadyMorgana wrote:(though extreme suffering once out of danger makes sense, as a deterrent).

Yes, there's the rub. You might recall the discussion on animal PTSD from this thread.

- El-Hage, Wissam and Catherine Belzung. "Unavoidable predatory stress in mice: An animal model of posttraumatic stress disorder." 2002.
- El Hage, Wissam, Guy Griebel, and Catherine Belzung. "Long-term impaired memory following predatory stress in mice." 2005.
- Zoladz, Phillip R.. "An ethologically relevant animal model of posttraumatic stress disorder: Physiological, pharmacological and behavioral sequelae in rats exposed to predator stress and social instability." 2008.
- Stam, Rianne. "PTSD and stress sensitisation: A tale of brain and body Part 2: Animal models." 2006.

LadyMorgana wrote:So prey pursued by predators probably aren't suffering as much as we first assume.

Still, vast numbers of offspring are eaten very early in life, due to r-selective reproduction. I find it hard to imagine this could be overcome in such a way that happiness outweighs it....

LadyMorgana wrote:But perhaps we should take it one step further - the arguments that support reducing x-risk on earth also support terraforming, lab universes etc. - the potential net suffering is outweighed by the potential gains in knowledge.

Well, fortunately not lab universes. If we were to create them, they would provide no information nor space that we could use, since they would be causally disconnected from our own universe.

The terraforming bit is unfortunate.