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Romashka comments on Effective Sustainability - results from a meetup discussion - Less Wrong Discussion
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When people devise techniques to, for example, propagate orchids in Petri plates (like the ubiquitous Phalaenopsis - it seems to me that those animals you have in mind as more stably happy would be like historically successful houseplants in many respects), what is the actual goal that envision? If there are orchids, but not habitats, do orchids still have any value? They are not sentient. Animals are not sentient. We can rule that their suffering matters, or doesn't matter, but why do you think it is anything other than a totally arbitrary choice?
Intact nature, on the other hand, makes possible the existence of very many relationships between ecosystem components. Suppose, for a moment, that we can simulate a habitat as multidimensional for a given organism, and then, tweaking those variables, find the happiest fit. How much resources would it take to model this for a population (if animals, or even plants, are capable of communication)? How would you decide which species deserves happiness and which doesn't?
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.
But dead rodents become food for many [soil] invertebrates, and so happiness is greater. (I think.)