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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

Everyone opposed to this should have to write a letter explaining why to the mothers of all the children that die every day of malaria. 3000 letters a day should just be doable if you learn to write fast and don't say much beyond that you don't care about their loss and grief.

Edit. Yes this is an emotive argument designed to jar people into looking at the consequences of dithering. It is fine for us rich to worry about possible unintended consequences, but doing so has a terrible outcome for real people [0].

0. For the record we already know what happens when you remove the particular species of mosquitos that transmit malaria from an ecosystem as we have done this using pesticides in the places rich people live. The answer is nothing other than people stop dying of malaria.

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Given the sheer complexity of the systems under consideration here (entire ecosystems, species population dynamics, the potential genome-wide interactions of even a single DNA mutation, etc) it seems wholly unreasonable to reduce this to the extent of "children dying == bad". To carry this absurd approach out to a simplified extreme, what if unintended consequences somehow resulted in twice as many children dying per day but we had failed to predict this due to not investigating things fully enough in advance?

Emotional appeal makes a very poor replacement for critical thinking.

>what if unintended consequences somehow resulted in twice as many children dying per day but we had failed to predict this due to not investigating things fully enough in advance?

And yet no plausible scenario is seriously identified to deliver such unintended consequences, so a net decrease of dead children is to be expected. That's past "good enough" in most people's book.

It helps that the effects would be indirect. Direct ones, like in the case of novel medicines, are scarier and harder to cope with. It's not easy to "try another body". But the indirect effect of, say, lower availability of certain food commodities due to bird and fish die-offs due to a dwindling mosquito population are as easy as "try other food sources".

I actually agree that this would presumably be a good thing to do. However, that's not because "children dying == bad" but rather precisely because a decent amount of research appears to have been directed at this idea already.

My intent was not to question the merits of the stated goal, but instead to highlight the importance of critical analysis instead of emotionally based lines of thought.

The idea is not to replace an emotional appeal with reason, but to wake people out of their complacency and have them face the reality of delay. Every day we wait we see another 3000 children die.

On the science side we already know the ecological consequences of removing these mosquitos - nothing. They play no important role in any ecosystem. More fundamentally ecosystems are not this sensitive to the removal of a single species, they are incredibly robust because unstable ecosystems don't survive. Species come and go, but ecosystems are near immovable.

The question comes down to a known massive bad outcome on one side (millions of kids dying) and a hypothetically and unmeasurably low risk on the other. What is the rational argument for delay?

That's a really bad attitude to take. It isn't that people don't care, it's that they worry about larger consequences. How about everyone who supports this write a letter to everyone on the earth explaining why they aren't worried about potential environmental collapse due to obliterating a key pollinator?

Note: I'm not sure what the actual risk is, I believe the general consensus is that non-malaria-carrying mosquito species will quickly fill in the ecological gap, but the point is that science and policy should look into the actual consequences, not make a knee-jerk reaction based on the more immediately noticeable appeal to emotion.

This is a logical trap. Mostly because people who worry about larger consequences can't satisfactorily describe how those can be evaluated. It's simply a lingering question that cannot be answered. If we treated every issue this way, nothing would ever happen, because larger consequences can never be perfectly foreseen.

Put another way, imagine you had a drug that cured the fatal illness of a family member. That drug was known to be safe for individuals to take. However, no one could receive the drug until a study was performed to understand how a decline in the mortality rate would affect the population. It's questionable whether your family member would survive until that study was performed. How would you feel?

That's a false equivalence. People have some knowledge of ecosystems, and they understand that removing a major component of an ecosystem might have catastrophic effects.

Making a small change to the survivability of humanity is not comparable, and certainly it is nonsense to suggest that this is equivalent to imposing the precautionary principle on every possible technological advance.

> and certainly it is nonsense to suggest that this is equivalent to imposing the precautionary principle on every possible technological advance

I agree, but would also like to point out that as technology in general becomes more "powerful" (for lack of a better term) ever increasing levels of precaution are inevitably going to be called for. The Wright brothers certainly didn't need to be regulated, but I'm glad SpaceX is...

I believe that the point being made by the person you're replying to isn't to avoid acting until future effects can be perfectly foreseen, as that milestone will generally never be reached. Rather, the future effects of an action should be evaluated to a level befitting the severity of the potential consequences.

Put another way, if something can be trivially reversed and can't reasonably be predicted to result in any severe negative effects, then not much analysis is called for. On the other hand, if something can be reasonably expected to have a lasting impact, particularly a negative one, careful analysis prior to action is much more important. In cases where it's difficult even to articulate the approximate range of possible effects, a thorough analysis becomes extremely important.

>the future effects of an action should be evaluated to a level befitting the severity of the potential consequences.

In particular, this should be be done over evaluating based on the emotional appeal of the consequences. Tragedies vs statistics, etc.

The species of mosquito that transmit malaria are not key pollinators in any ecosystem. We already know what happens in the places where rich people live when these species are killed - nothing other than people stop dying of malaria.

It is fine for us rich people to pontificate over ecosystems and possible unintended consequences, it is another for those poor people that have to watch their children dying in their arms.

> obliterating a key pollinator?

Are any of the malaria-carrying mosquitoes key pollinators? Please cite your sources.

>I'm not sure what the actual risk is

Sorry, I tried to make it clear that I'm not actually up-to-date on the science and that I was arguing against the attitude, not the position.

No there are not.

Do you have any evidence that any reasonably foreseeable consequence is greater than 3000 children a day dying? If not, given that you know with a high degree of certainty that 3000 children are dying every die while there is a delay, it seems prudent to proceed as quickly as possible.

It's very naive/irresponsible to imply that anyone who would be concerned about massive ecosystem impacts doesn't care about malaria victims. Even the researchers are hesitant.

> The scientists acknowledge the technology raises serious concerns. So it will require broad political debate, rigorous regulation and the consent of people living in any areas where they might be released, they say.

This is an emotional argument. I don't believe opposition is about morals, it's about concern over messing with the food chain. It would be incredibly naive to think we can mess with the food chain consequence free.

What if crashing the species results in millions of people dying? Will you write a letter to all those mothers?

I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but we need to know exactly what effects it will have first. And "grieving mothers" is not sufficient.

> What if crashing the species results in millions of people dying?

Do you know of any actual ecologist who thinks that those particular species are vital to the functioning of those ecosystems?

Here is one ecologist who thinks the removal of some mosquito species would be quite harmless:

"Yet in many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. Life would continue as before — or even better."

https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html

Malaria is the number one historical killer of humanity period. I believe that qualifies on practival grounds. Its death has been long overdue and I would say we have a moral imperative to eradicate the greatest threat to our species.

> "grieving mothers" is not sufficient.

Historically, the species that threaten humans (or are tasty to humans), gets virtually wiped out. There's nothing new or scary about the proposition. Species aren't sacred, as every species dies out and has been replaced by others, countless times for all manner of reasons. Maybe it promotes something worse. There will always be other dangers to contend with.

Of course it is an emotional argument - it is meant to make concrete what is really happening right now as we dither.

The ecosystem will be fine without the mosquito species that transmit malaria and even if it wasn't it is a price worth paying. This whole argument is stupid anyway as we already know that killing off these mosquito species in the places where rich people live does not cause the ecosystem to crash.

Come on...

I do like the idea of killing them of. Still it is very valid not to extinct a species because of us.

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

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