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Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

This is exciting. The American Chestnut is an amazing tree that once grew with trunks as wide as a car. The article did not mention that once the blight was discovered, there was somewhat of a panic to harvest them, which rather reduced the genetic diversity and ruined the possibility of any natural resistance. The horrendous effect our species has on the diversity of life is incredibly sad, re: Dodos and Carrier Pigeons and likely thousands of other unique species. But I would not cry if the biting mosquito that spreads disease, the bacteria that causes wet dog smell, and Cryphonectria parasitica went extinct never to appear again.

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> But I would not cry if the biting mosquito that spreads disease, the bacteria that causes wet dog smell, and Cryphonectria parasitica went extinct never to appear again.

Remember when Mao tried that with evil evil sparrows stealing seeds from the party and caused the greatest famine in human history? Fun times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign

Not all mosquito spread disease or bite humans and the ones that do are not a major part of important ecosystems. When DEET was used heavily it didn't collapse any ecosystems. If we eliminate those species, the non-spreaders will fill the niche while eliminating major human suffering. It is not comparable to killing any sparrow sized bird.

As far as we know. My argument is that large chaotic systems are often poorly understood by us and we have gotten it wrong many times in the past.

I agree that erradicating bad mosquitos feels like a win, but I personally don’t know if there’s any unforeseen effects.

Your argument lacks nuance. It comes across as though you are unwilling to accept that we can learn from the mistakes of the past and be more careful this time, because with that attitude you don't have to engage with the specifics of a proposal. It really seems like pointless fearmongering, especially after the article already addressed some of the specific concerns about what might go wrong with introducing GMO chestnuts into the wild. Reminding people of the general concern that making significant changes to a whole ecosystem can have unforeseen consequences doesn't add anything to that conversation.

My reply was to the comment I quoted, not the introduction of GMO chestnuts. We have had great success at introducing gmo crops very successfully.

We have more often caused harm than good when eradicating entire sections of ecosystems. From what I’ve read at least.

Ha. He learned from the past that some things are better to not mess with.

If you fail at something 1000 times at some point humility should force you to reconsider trying.

If something is worth doing it's worth doing. I'm glad for example the people trying to cure various diseases don't have the characteristic that you call humility but I reckon is something else entirely.

Risk vs. reward

Never risk the thing you can’t afford to lose to gain something you don’t need.

Different when it comes to life ending sickness.

Now you're talking about something completely different than what you were talking about initially.

Importantly, the mosquito that is the major spreader of malaria is an invasive species in most of the world. So wiping out that species is actually correcting the ecosystem. Win-win.

We could maintain a few populations in labs and/or isolated areas. Inspects repopulate hella fast, so it’d be easy enough to undo such a project if we found that they were a lynchpin of some kind.

Is there consensus on how significant the sparrow thing was to the famine? I would have guessed that the whole “you’re not allowed to have your own farms any more, you now have to work in these farms, but you don’t get to keep any of the food from these farms” thing was a much more significant cause.

I’ve read “Mao’s Great Famine” by Frank Dikötter, but it’s been a while. Wikipedia [1] captures every contributing cause, but I’d emphasise the illusion of superabundance, which was essentially local government exaggerating the size of their harvests to make themselves look good to Beijing. Their province then had to export the entire harvest to cover their lies. Incompetent government was the major cause either way.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine#Causes_...

This is a core reason many are freaked out by too much government.

If a company screws up. It goes out of business. Others will take its place. If a government screws up, oh well.

Companies screwing up has caused way more harm than gov. Bhopal, lead gasoline, asbestos, tobacco industry, strike busting layoffs company towns, oil spills, ozone hole, greenhouse gases. On and on.

Anyone who thinks gov is the enemy has been bamboozooled by corporate propaganda.

>Anyone who thinks gov is the enemy has been bamboozooled by corporate propaganda.

This is how we get starving people and hyperinflation in Zimbabwe. Because the government repossess farms and gives the farm land to people who don't know or don't care about farming. The lack of food forces the "good" government to import food by printing money. Since the excess money is not being invested into food production it is causing stagflation and since the obligation to import food never goes away the rate of printing has to keep going up which ultimately results in hyperinflation.

If anything, governments are fully responsible for causing bad incentives and encouraging destructive behavior by companies. It's absolutely laughable that people think that setting the wrong incentives should be compensated by cooperative goodwill of 7 billion people when greed is a much more effective way of achieving good outcomes if the incentives are right. Especially since there aren't 7 billion selfless people on the planet.

They are both collections of flawed humans. Accountability is necessary regardless of the collective noun you use.

From the accounts I've read, I think the sparrows thing was more of a symbol of what happened in the culture and an exemplar of the Party's thinking than the linchpin in the ecology they're often portrayed as.

Remember when WHO tried that with smallpox and now humans don't die a hideous death, or survive with permanent disfigurement?

Fun times.

Interestingly, the disease carrying mosquito is an introduced/invasive species, so eradication in many parts of the world would be repairing the damage that humans caused.

> would not cry if the biting mosquito that spreads disease [...] went extinct

Now now, ecological disasters are only permitted if they make a few people temporarily very wealthy.

Globally improving everyone and their descendants' life a bit, without even paying for it, is just not okay. They can just constantly fumigate themselves with decreasingly effective chemicals to deal with it.

> bacteria that causes wet dog smell

Is wet dog smell caused by some particular bacteria, or would this be more like wiping out an entire ecosystem?

> bacteria that causes wet dog smell

My dog had a terrible yeast allergy. His paws would swell, his hair would fall out. He was constantly itching. We had to bathe him twice a week with what was basically a shampoo form of Vagistat, and every day had to coat his paw pads in actual Vagistat, and in between the toes and pads. Oh and tons of steroids 10mg 2x day.

He HATED it, but it kept him itch free, and he never smelled like wet dog.

The steroids also served a second function we didn't know at the time, they kept his brain tumor under control for about a year until we found it and had grown too big to be controlled any longer. So it gave us an extra year with him before we had to put him down after 2 days in an induced coma trying to get the seizures to stop.

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