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Lumifer comments on Effective Sustainability - results from a meetup discussion - Less Wrong
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I think that precisely because natural ecosystems make possible - indeed require - very many relationships between components, they are not optimal for maximizing something we value, except for values tailored to their nature (status quo biased environmentalism, deep ecology).
They are unsuitable to maximize anything else, such as happiness, pleasure, even biodiversity. At least compared to what a technological civilization could implement, given enough dedicated resources.
As an example, take rodents, who have relatively high number of offspring but require stable populations in their niche most of the time (due to fixed carrying capacity). If you have 5 or more offspring, all capable of feeling pain, fear, starvation, thirst etc., and only 2 can survive to reproduce successfully, you have a strong prima facie argument for a suffering surplus.
That's a fully general argument against anything existing in reality right now.
Perhaps, except for sustaining and improving the technological civilization we have now, as well as all efforts to push against opposing values... that contains a lot of what humans do. (The rest is due to the fact that humans usually don't really maximize anything systematically.)
And as I said, there is probably a margin where nature is optimal; we want clean water, air, resilience of food production, tourism etc. anyway. But that margin is finite and it becomes smaller as technological know-how increases.
Your position supports the argument that it could be a good thing -- it is inadequate for supporting the argument that it will be a good thing.
"All efforts"..? It's pretty easy to get unreasonable here.
A "technological civilization" with enough resources can implement much better versions of all of these.
You're right; perhaps there will be e.g. more suffering than the whole thing is worth.
Yes, that's why I'd expect the value of nature to decrease as technology progresses. If you look to science fiction, the Star Trek Federation certainly had no need for any untouched nature for any purpose other than sentimentality.