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Comment by krferriter | Hacker News Reader

There is a weird number of people in the replies here arguing for strange things like a fundamental right to life for individual mosquitos, against brushing teeth, in favor of preserving invasive species, in favor of the naturalistic fallacy, that diminishing the population of a particular species violates the consent of humans in the area where that species lives, etc.

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Yes wanting to do the right thing mixed with very little domain knowledge and a only vague hint of what the right thing might be… is a dangerous combination, and very common among people advocating for “good” these days.

HN's Eternal September [0] seems to have started late last year. I saw this happen to Slashdot, then Reddit, and now HN. What will be the next online forum for high-quality discussion?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

The main demographic of this website are very evidently not scientists or even scientifically minded. So yeah, we get junk like this rather than substantive scientific discussion.

I think the demographic is very well informed and we should praise the diversity of opinions when honestly voiced. People on this website almost always discuss the central point that was raised and rarely use rhetorical fallacies. On the other hand what you are doing is very clearly an ad hominem.

Partially relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1494/

Mosquito Man will come for you too.

I think the most reasonable objection is that nobody can seriously claim to know the sum of repercussions of such an experiment. Otherwise this study wouldn't be needed anyway.

Personally I am fine to choose mosquitoes as a target if we really need to use techniques like this. Experiments that used natural predators to control a population also have mixed results. I assume that would be frogs or birds in case of mosquitoes.

Surely they have all ready the original article :-D

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