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Comment by ckastner | Hacker News Reader

This may sound cynical, but I'm honestly just curious in hearing arguments:

What's the point of risking human lives and wasting resources on something that is kept a secret? For all we know, more people have walked on the Moon than seen this forest.

I'm not criticizing that they did it. I'm glad they did. I can see the emotional value to it, in keeping a species that has survived millions of years alive longer, and I share that emotion.

But was it rational? What was the benefit of this action?

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I don’t think the benefit of our natural spaces is primarily for us. It’s for every generation after us.

We’re at a high point of consumerism and urbanism, but I don’t expect that to last long. I believe future generations will be much better at both conserving and exploiting what to us are arcane natural resources.

It just feels rude to destroy our natural inheritance and leave so little for the next generation.

It wouldn’t be the first time a human civilization did so. But that’s not the kind of civilization I want to be a part of.

This is going to sound wishy washy (and so probably tick the "No" box for your first question) but I think that humanity sometimes needs to remind itself that it can do things that don't plot rationally on the cost/profit quadrant.

Think about those Thai boys in the cave - the amount of effort and money required to get them out could have saved multiples of lives from preventable disease, etc. But something about that situation (helped by media interest, techy solutions, our archetypal fascination for people stuck in deep holes and so on) brought the world together and made lots of us care about something that really had nothing to do with us and that we stood to gain zero benefit from regardless of outcome.

We live in very splintered times. There's an immeasurable value in coming together to Do Better for a while before we all splinter off and start f*cking each other over again.

From a purely monetary standpoint, genetic diversity has growing commercial uses [1]. Isolated ecosystems often contain genes and enzymes that let us access new areas of chemical space (this is big in drug discovery ATM). We recognize that sequencing methods at a given time may not capture all of the relevant info about a gene (ex. methylation, weird folds, expression), so having living samples as new technology becomes available is critical in this research.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_product

Speaking of genetic diversity, interestingly, the grove in question has none whatsoever.

In the gorge there are perhaps 100 clumps of trees, but genetically there could be as few as one or two 'individuals'. This is because each plant has multiple clumps of trunks. The plants basically clone themselves, which makes the entire population extremely precarious in terms of disease.

Some folks know there are more columns in their life ledger than money. Their actions can seem irrational to folks who haven't learned that yet.

You're appealing to an emotion that I have already conceded to share. And it can't be more than an emotion, unless you are one of the very select few who have seen this forest.

However, my emotions occasionally tell me something that intellectually, I know not to be in my best long-term interest (or even far from it).

Edit: Try to think of my argument another way: I feel a certain way about this, and I would like to rationalize that feeling.

> Try to think of my argument another way: I feel a certain way about this, and I would like to rationalize that feeling.

Don't. This is fundamentally a "type error". Rationality can tell you how to achieve what you consider important, but ultimately it can't tell you what to want.

(Notice that mainstream economics has already abdicated this; it talks of "rational" actors with "preferences", but the preferences are assumed to exist a priori and not to evolve in response to information)

>Don't. This is fundamentally a "type error". Rationality can tell you how to achieve what you consider important, but ultimately it can't tell you what to want.

This.

This is such good advice. Really good advice to be exact. This exact piece of advice has been a multi-decade learning experience in my case.

However, I share GP's desire to be the fool that tries and offer them the closest thing I have to reconciliation.

"We made the problem, we need to fix it. Triage is a function of irreplaceability and capability to remedy."

This grove fit the bill. Therefore, we did it.

But feelings are often rational. To dismiss ethics as irrational is to dismiss social cohesion, a necessary need in human psychology.

To allow a rare thing to be destroyed is a loss to our collective human potential, because we can no longer study or understand it as it shifts through time.

Further: we have not the right to disturb it. A good attitude is, to exist on Earth doing as little harm as we can.

In-spite of our self confidence, our knowledge of biology and ecology is just the tiniest beginning. Letting organisms and genes disappear is insanely reckless.

An analogy would be an illiterate dark age monk wondering if he should let random Greek and Roman books burn in his fireplace.

Despite all that we understand about the world, we still no shockingly little. Once certain species are gone, they’re gone. Biodiversity is critical to life on earth. We often take a mechanical view of nature, but it’s a vast interconnected web of which we’re a part of.

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