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Comment by Nifty3929 | Hacker News Reader

I'm as or more cynical than the next guy - but it seems to me that being able to communicate with animals has high utility for humans. Partly from an emotional or companionship perspective as we've been doing with dogs for a long time, but maybe even on purely utilitarian grounds.

If we want to know something about what's going on in the ocean, or high on a mountain or in the sky or whatever - what if we can just ask some animals about it? What about for things that animals can naturally perceive that humans have trouble with - certain wavelengths of light or magnetic fields for example? How about being able to recruit animals to do specific tasks that they are better suited for? Seems like a win for us, and maybe a win for them as well.

Not sure what else, but history suggests that the more people have been able to communicate with each other, the better the outcomes. I assume this holds true more broadly as well.

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I was just reading how fishing industry’s longlines have caught many dolphins and other bycatches. It would be great to be able to give them warnings, or even better, to ask them to keep other big animals away from the longlines.

I know this comment is totally innocent but it does kind of bum me out to be at a point in time where instead of addressing our impact on the environment directly, we're trying to make computers that can talk to dolphins so we can tell them to stay out of the way lol

You don't tend to hear about it and not that there isn't still progress to be made, but there has been tonnes of progress on fisheries interactions with protected bycatch species. For ex the infamous dolphin problem in the eastern tropical Pacific purse seine tuna fishery is down 99.8% from its peak to the point populations are recovering, despite the fishery intentionally setting on dolphin schools to catch > 150,000 t of yellowfin tuna per year.

Pelagic gillnets are probably the gear that still have the most issues with dolphin bycatch, and acoustic pingers that play a loud ultrasonic tone when they detect an echolocation click are already used to reduce interactions in some fisheries.

One of the things I think is amazing is that people will say “here’s a way to make the world better” and others will react with “it’s so sad that you propose making the world better instead of making it perfect”. I think it’s great.

Dear Mr Dolphin, can you please tell the large sharks to not go that way?

- No, f... the sharks!

Or, like, we could stop ravaging the oceans by industrial fishing, stop pretending magical technology will save the day, and try to limit our resource consumption to sustainable levels?

Humanity’s relationship with animals is so schizophrenic. On the one hand, let’s try to learn how to talk to cute dolphins and chat with them what it’s like to swim!, and on the other, well yeah that steak on my table may have once lead a subjective experience before it was slaughtered, and mass-farming it wrecks the ecosystem I depend on to live, but gosh it’s so tasty, I can’t give that up!

Humans are omnivores. I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals.

At the same time, I want to be as humane as practical; I don’t want to cause needless suffering to any creature. If I kill a bug, I don’t want it to suffer. Same with food animals.

The more like me an animal is, the less I want to eat it.

There are a lot of humans. Any action to forcefully reduce the number of humans or to forcefully reduce birth rates is almost certainly way more morally abhorrent to me, than doing what is necessary to feed those humans.

Really? You cannot fathom an animal population that has exceeded it's ecosystem's capacity and has no predators so needs to be culled?

Doesn't happen.

That situation always auto-corrects as resource availability shifts.

What does happen is humans find things like mice / locust / kangaroo plagues inconvenient, so we decide to intervene.

It's not like lions get tired of all those pesky gazelle getting up in their grillz and find the need to get about in helicopters thinning the herd.

> Humans are omnivores. I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals.

This is akin to saying ''humans are violent, so i am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to commit violence''.

So just be honest: you WANT to eat meat because you like it, consequences be damned.

And of course if you truly want to feed as many humans as possible the only solution is vegetarianism or even veganism. Meat is just way too wasteful to be a decent solution.

Do you also have this negative attitude towards all other non-vegitarian animals, or is it just for humans since they have more capability to cause more ecological harm?

Most importantly, humans have the ability to reflect their actions and decide differently. Both to minimize suffering, and to keep the plant hospitable to humans.

> And of course if you truly want to feed as many humans as possible the only solution is vegetarianism or even veganism. Meat is just way too wasteful to be a decent solution.

This myth needs to die. Two thirds of all farmland on this planet is pasture [1] that isn’t fertile enough to grow food for humans except by raising animals on it. If we were to switch to a plant based diet, the vast majority of our farmland as a civilization becomes unusable. Most of the world uses animals to generate calories from unproductive land, first via dairy and then slaughtering the animals for food.

Not to mention, animals have been crucial sources of sustainable fertilizer for many thousands of years, without which agriculture would never have been as productive.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

Gross.

What’s gross is the idea that plants are “lower” and thus less deserving of value to life. Either embrace radically life denying Jainism, anti-natalism, voluntary extinction movement, and benevolent world exploder theory - or admit that you are just as cruel as those you implicitly claim to be better than (as a presumably non gross person)

But white vegans aren’t prepared to actually reckon with the logical conclusion of their ideas. Go read David Benatar (he’s a vegan whose actually consistent btw)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Never_to_Have_Been

How are plants not lower on an evolution scale than say, mammals? They are less complex biologically and less capable of affecting their environment.

Surely some debate to be had here. Plants absolutely affect their environments, just over longer timescales.

I never understood that line of reasoning. Plants do not have a central nervous system and, as of the current scientific consensus, are not aware of their subjective experience like animals are. Humans are omnivores, capable of thriving on a plant-based diet. The logical consequence, if you try to minimise suffering, is to eat plants instead of animals.

Life is a game of shifting carbon. To stay alive, you need to kill. But you can try to limit that to the least amount of killing required, and to killing those life forms without sentience as we understand it. This is the foundation of any ethical reasoning.

Having said all that, I also reject the vertical ordering of life on the tree of evolution. Plants are just very different from us, not necessarily higher or lower. Considering we have to make a choice as to what we are ready to sacrifice to survive, we can still choose those life forms that likely are not capable of suffering like we do, before turning to those more similar to us.

Specifically, this gave me the reaction, bc it seems in bad company with other ideologies:

> I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals.

Deep history exists in our "biological" context and is critical reality, but arguing some "biological imperative" to act on it, that strikes me as a strange place to start

Context: am biochemist, and I think about biology and biochemistry as a very integrated part of my worldview. But I don't harken to any biological imperative for my actions and choices. It explains them, it doesn't command them. Distorting our biology and psychology is what makes us human and agentic imho

Why? GP's arguments seem pretty reasonable and tame. What are yours?

Sorry, I was admittedly lazy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43722576

I suppose this isn’t exactly what you were getting at, but now I can’t help but wonder exactly how delicious a dolphin is.

>we could stop ravaging the oceans by industrial fishing

To do this likely would require large-scale war.

Or, you know, don’t fish at all so we don’t kill possibly trillions of sentient fish every year for no necessary reason whatsoever?

Side bonus, we also don’t kill the highly sentient and highly intelligent creatures you’re concerned about.

3 billion people get at least 20% of their protein from fish, and roughly 500 million rely on fishing for a pay check.[1]

Those people can all just starve, and you're fine with that?

1. https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/will-there-be-enough-f...

I am all for the Disney utopian fantasy of us living with animals.

However if universal communication was to be made. Don't you think that animals are going to be pretty pissed to discover what we have done with their kingdom?

"Hi Mr Dolphin, how's the sea today?" "Wet and a plastic bottle cap got lodged in my blowhole last night..."

I suspect Dolphins can tell people apart and will recognize you as not the guy that threw the bottle cap akin to all those stories about crows.

Certainly will be interesting to see how much we can bribe Dolphins to do once we have faster communication methods.

So you think you’re not responsible for the fucked-up oceans because you let other people throw your trash into the sea for you, and the organically farmed salmon you eat surely wasn’t produced under atrocious conditions?

Embrace antinatalism and life denial or embrace amor fati. Sitting on the sidelines like so many others do on this topic is intellectually bankrupt.

Eh, collective punishment is the fallacy.

These problems are generally industrial in nature so it's very knowable as to where a large source of pollution comes from.

There just isn't a political will to actually enforce laws.

I think you're overestimating the dolphins here. Even humans have trouble not placing collective blame on groups of people they don't know well - it even has a name in social psychology, the "out-group homogeneity effect". Just think about opposing political groups or international relations.

I'm not suggesting a Disney utopian fantasy. I'm just suggesting that in a very pragmatic way, we can ask them questions and get meaningful answers, or ask them to do things for us.

What's going on down the the sea over there? Would you mind pulling that thing from here to there?

Or whatever - I don't know what we'll figure out to do, but certainly something.

As far as them being mad at us, I doubt they will be, but I'd be interested to get their perspective - if they have one.

I do not believe we can expect anything resembling a human level of intelligence to be discovered.

Or do you mind going over there and planting this round thing to the side of the ship belonging to the other humans?

There's an Apple TV+ series called Extrapolations with a plot of a dystopian future heavily affected by climate change. One of the plotlines involve humans successfully developing the technology to communicate with humpback whales.

So, the story involves an animal DNA archivist interacting with what's presented as the last living humpback whale, focusing on its isolation etc. It turns out the research lab's goal is to trick the whale by faking mating signals, aiming to get it to reveal information about whale history and culture. It's essentially data mining the animal.

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