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Comment by owenthejumper | Hacker News Reader

It's incredible how much damage we have done to ourselves in the past 250 years, and how much effort do we now need to spend to undo that damage

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> how much effort do we now need to spend to undo that

Moving a few wolfs, I would hardly call that effort! Stopping regulations and allowing some hunters in Yellowstone would have similar effects!

It is more like morons, who do not understand biology are in goverment! Overprotection allowed elk overpopulation!

For clarification, I wouldn't say stopping regulation. It should be "updating regulation" - either increasing hunt quotas, or having an 'open season' time.

It really wouldn't. Hunters aren't very effective for deer control: they are interested in shooting impressive bucks, which doesn't make a substantial dent on populations.

It's incredible how much good we have done to ourselves in the past 250 years, and how much good we can do in the now and the future.

Downvoted as this comment feels like it's trying to be witty/upshowing the parent comment without actually engaging with it or offering anything of substance. If the comment was along the lines of "yes, but we've also done a lot of good, let's reflect on both", great. But that's not what it was. Instead it feels like a statement that's trying to argue with the parent comment despite the parent comment never saying we haven't done any good.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

regaurdless of what was intended your downvote and reply shows a lack of good faith.

It wasn't a criticism of what they were saying (a point on which I agree with that poster), but whether the comment itself was contributing to the discussion or not. It was a very low-effort comment that offered no reflection on what the parent said, doesn't tie into the original post, and lacks depth towards its own point.

Low effort but I disagree about the rest - the opposition helps makes it clear how silly the formula it was paroding is.

It’s is! Just in medicine alone. And then economically, as well as justice. From 98% of the people living in abject poverty, no pairs of shoes, two changes of clothes, selling off relatives for money, dying from simple infections… to where we are today. It’s like the glory days of Rome but much better.

Surely this is the best of all possible worlds, Dr. Pangloss.

The question is how much of that power will we use to do good for the rest of the species on the planet? I’ve just finished reading “Not the end of the world” and found it to be an informative and balanced discussion on the topic that recognizes the vast benefits of human development (to humans), the cost to the rest of the planet and the progress we’ve made in the past 50 years in undoing some of the harm. This is a nuanced topic and deserves that kind of debate.

Which exact species do you want to help? Ticks, mosquitos and anthrax or more like birds, trees and elk? Where do you draw the line?

What a strange question. As a starter I’d like to see us help trees, coral, other primates and megafauna as much as possible. The former because they support so much other biodiversity and the latter because they’re nice to have in the world. Generally speaking though I favor sustainability where that means continuing to improve the quality of life for humans, especially those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, whilst trying to minimize the number of other species we drive to extinction. Again, nuance is key here - I don’t think my inability to enumerate every species worthy of help means that we should just dismiss the effort to help other species.

I don't ask you to "enumerate every species worthy of help" but rather to formulate a criteria you use to figure out who is worthy of help and who is not.

The "nice to have in the world" sounds quite arbitrary to me. I don't think the question I ask is strange, I'm trying to figure out the idea you believe in. So far you assume we share some core belief on the topic and the rest is obvious, which I don't think is the case.

OK, I apologize if I misunderstood. My core belief is that it’s possible for humans to continue to prosper without causing a mass extinction of other species. I believe that largely happens through managing our impacts on the environment in which the species live and not just through direct intervention in the lives of those species, e.g. reducing deforestation and rewilding, reducing ocean acidification to save coral reefs. So I don’t think we have to choose specific species we wish to save and those we are willing to let go extinct.

Are you really promoting the philosophy of Leibnizian Optimism in 2025?

I suggest reading Candide by Voltaire, first published 266 years as a critique to the philosophy you are currently espousing.

  People:   "If God, then why bad?"[0]
  Leibniz:  "God and bad can coexist. E.g. we live in the best possible world."[1]
  Voltaire: "Here's a depiction of some fictional bad."

I don't think Voltaire engaged meaningfully with Leibniz's argument. (I think that Leibniz is simply right tho, in the mathematical sense, so there isn't much room for Voltaire anyway.)

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

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

I suspect that "being right in the mathematical sense" is the very thing that Voltaire was lampooning.

Doesn't Leibniz's argument assume a single all-powerful god, and an external notion of good and evil? I would call it a 'not-even-wrong' argument - perhaps it's perfectly correct given its assumptions, but the assumptions aren't (necessarily) anything to do with this world...

I don’t really see how you got there from what they actually said.

We've come a long way in those 266 years: global population 10x'd, meanwhile the share of the population living in extreme poverty went from over 80% to nearly 8%, so not all optimism was misguided. Also there's a lot of room between despair and a Panglossian caricature, and I don't think acknowledging that a lot of good has happened in the past (and not necessarily suggesting it was all inevitable or automatic) rises to that caricature.

These replies that simply restate a previous comment by inverting its meaning are really starting to annoy me. They're neither witty nor intelligent. Just lazy and annoying.

Waiting for someone to reply to this doing exactly this

People assuming that last 250 years were predominantly harm are annoying. The human race is thriving by every objective metric of nature: population, lifespan, dispensable energy per capita.

Humans on their phone 24/7 due to addiction and/or who hold multiple jobs and still can't afford rent and/or who suffer from racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc. are not thriving.

Oh, but they live to be 75, can buy a 75 inch television, and there are 8 billion of them. I'd still say they're not thriving.

Would you consider the folks in Brave New World thriving?

And don't get me started on environmental destruction. This post was about wolves and trees thriving, by the way.

In response to a one-sided and overdone statement a reversed and equally overdone statement is a good way to point out the problems with such statements. I am annoyed and dismayed by the simpleminded self-flagellation implied by statements like the one I reacted to and think that people who make such statements should be time-warped back the mentioned 250 years and made to live in that era for, say, a year or so. When they are returned to the current era they will sound a different tune - that is if they manage to survive that year without succumbing to disease, some violent attack by man or beast or by starvation.

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