You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

HedonicTreader comments on Effective Sustainability - results from a meetup discussion - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: Gunnar_Zarncke 29 March 2015 10:15PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (22)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: HedonicTreader 30 March 2015 06:13:09PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Lumifer 30 March 2015 06:35:07PM *  -1 points [-]

except for sustaining and improving the technological civilization we have now

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.

as well as all efforts to push against opposing values

"All efforts"..? It's pretty easy to get unreasonable here.

a margin where nature is optimal; we want clean water, air, resilience of food production, tourism etc

A "technological civilization" with enough resources can implement much better versions of all of these.

Comment author: HedonicTreader 30 March 2015 09:45:12PM 2 points [-]

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.

You're right; perhaps there will be e.g. more suffering than the whole thing is worth.

A "technological civilization" with enough resources can implement much better versions of all of these.

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.