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Decline of Indian vultures

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Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#101

Post by haswell »

lupusreal wrote: post #54
haswell wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t need anything nearing AGI for these bots to become nearly indistinguishable from humans and to have increasing impact on communities. I think it’s utterly fascinating how quickly people have lost sight of current reality, either by believing AGI must be around the corner, or by being sure it absolutely isn’t. Assuming 4o is the most advanced model we ever have, the point still stands. Many of the poorly buil…

> "We don’t need anything nearing AGI for these bots to become nearly indistinguishable from humans" More and more I think AGI is shifting to mean "machine soul" or some nebulous wishy-washy unfalsifiable religious/philosophy shit like that. What meaning could AGI have which is empirically verifiable, other than being indistinguishable from people? Humans I presume are supposed to have "general intelligence", so if t…

Language is just a variable resolution abstraction on top of non-linguistic thinking and information processing.

I think it’s a mistake to equate the language ability of these models with general intelligence, even if the language produced is excellent.

I think some people see AGI that way (some nebulous unfalsifiable thing), but that’s not what I’m arguing. I think there’s a strong case to be made that at a minimum, AGI’s core “knowledge” will need to be made up of far more than just a lossy textual representation of the world.

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#102

Post by kergonath »

ffsm8 wrote: post #85
nyc_data_geek wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we are all interdependent, and monocultures fail. Loss of biodiversity means you are more likely to die of starvation. Loss of habitat means you are more likely to die of disease. Loss of biodiversity means less resiliency to a changing climate and world. We get a lot of our medicines and medical treatments from plants and animals, historically and to this day. If not for those creatures, these avenues of pro…

You're making it sound a lot more straightforward then it is. We're currently producing incredible amounts of food through monocultures, which is kinda the opposite of biodiversity. So the relationship with starvation is objectively inverted: we sacrificed it to boost yields! Resilience is another thing that's very hard to reason about, because why would resilience matter to you if your race dies out? Sure, some anim…

> We're currently producing incredible amounts of food through monocultures, which is kinda the opposite of biodiversity. So the relationship with starvation is objectively inverted: we sacrificed it to boost yields!

Even those monocultures depend on a working ecosystem around them.

Regarding yields, it’s a risk assessment. They can be great in the short term and then crater when the soil is destroyed. At this point fertilisers are required just to keep production level. And if there is a disease that wipes out a species, then it’s game over. And it happens occasionally, from the Irish potato blight, the almost-complete destruction of European vines, whatever is destroying olive trees near the Mediterranean. There are several examples. Lack of flexibility in the long term means lack of resilience.

> Resilience is another thing that's very hard to reason about, because why would resilience matter to you if your race dies out? Sure, some animals and insects would have a higher chance of survival under different settings, but why does that matter to you, a human?

There are philosophical problems with this (those species are not less deserving than we are), but let’s put them aside for the sake of the argument.

The problem is that there is a lot that we don’t understand about the world around us, and we occasionally discover that a species was useful when it disappears. Or the contrary, that it is an invasive pest if we introduce it somewhere. Or that useless things like mangroves are actually critical to avoid unchecked erosion. Or that burning that useless Amazonian forest is actually terrible on at least 3 levels (direct emissions, that forest is not available anymore to absorb other emissions, topsoil erosion and degradation that makes it terrible agricultural land over a generation).

This is very bad because we have only one planet and we cannot shrug, write it down, and do it better next time.

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#103

Post by VikingCoder »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #99
VikingCoder wrote: post #80

I once had someone on Reddit comment back to me, "Why should I care about biodiversity?" As someone who grew up watching "Life on Earth," I could not relate to their question at all. It was like if someone asked me, "Why should I care about oxygen?" And of course, I had the shame that if I can't explain something simply, then I don't really understand it. I still don't have a great answer that I can offer. But wow, t…

If you care about something so deeply that you can't tolerate people questioning it, but don't really understand why, then you probably have some other problems to address as well. I'm not trying to be judgemental, but that surely implies you've been taken in by a dogma without proper scrutiny.

I thank you for your perspective, and if you don't mind - I'd like to ask in return...

Let me guess for a moment that you care very deeply that humanity not go extinct.

Can you explain why, in truly objective terms?

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#104

Post by kergonath »

ffsm8 wrote: post #93
nyc_data_geek wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point about monocultures increasing yields. That said, they are also more susceptible to being wiped out by black swan events (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease ) Resilience of your food supply should matter to you, as an organism that needs food to live.

But the reality is that whenever such an event happened... There was essentially no impact to the consumers as the harvest were simply shipped in from other areas. Once again, hard to convince anyone under these circumstances

> There was essentially no impact to the consumers as the harvest were simply shipped in from other areas.

… in the US. You left that critical bit out, and even then you have things like the dust bowl. Even to this day, without going back to the potato blight, there are famines regularly. It’s really hard not to see that as a direct effect on consumers.

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#105

Post by kergonath »

aurareturn wrote: post #2

Question: Did another animal take the role of the vultures? Nature is very efficient. If there opportunity, it seems like some animals might evolve to fill that role.

> Nature is very efficient.

This is a meme and it is unfounded. In most cases, nature is good enough.

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#106

Post by kergonath »

moffkalast wrote: post #76
mattmaroon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overall methodology is highly suspect but “vultures are good” is probably accurate.

"Vultures are great when there are piles of rotting dead animals laying in the street" would be even more accurate.

Not necessarily in the streets. Even if the carcasses are in landfills or in the countryside, scavengers are useful.

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#107

Post by hollerith »

kergonath wrote: post #104
ffsm8 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the reality is that whenever such an event happened... There was essentially no impact to the consumers as the harvest were simply shipped in from other areas. Once again, hard to convince anyone under these circumstances

> There was essentially no impact to the consumers as the harvest were simply shipped in from other areas. … in the US. You left that critical bit out, and even then you have things like the dust bowl. Even to this day, without going back to the potato blight, there are famines regularly. It’s really hard not to see that as a direct effect on consumers.

During the Dust Bowl, there was no welfare, so the families in Oklahoma and nearby who were relying on a harvest and had no other plan for getting income and no savings ended up without food and without money with which to buy food.

There's never been a time in US history or a place in the US such that there was a shortage of food for people who had money to buy food unless you count situations like the Donner Party in which a caravan spent the winter of 1846–1847 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

The US not only has the most productive chunk of farmland in the world, but also much fewer natural barriers to efficient transportation compared to productive farming regions in the rest of the world. Certainly during the Dust Bowl, there was plenty of food grown in places like Iowa and Illinois that could easily and reliably have been shipped to Oklahoma, but no one did because no one (not even the federal government) considered it their job to help the hungry people in Oklahoma.

Part of the reason it took so long for the US to grow a welfare system is the American ethic of individual freedom and distrust of government, but another part is that it was easier for people to get the basics of survival than in places like Germany where the welfare system developed many decades earlier (the Dust Bowl being of course an exception to the general easiness).

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#108

Post by AmericanChopper »

VikingCoder wrote: post #103
AmericanChopper wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you care about something so deeply that you can't tolerate people questioning it, but don't really understand why, then you probably have some other problems to address as well. I'm not trying to be judgemental, but that surely implies you've been taken in by a dogma without proper scrutiny.

I thank you for your perspective, and if you don't mind - I'd like to ask in return... Let me guess for a moment that you care very deeply that humanity not go extinct. Can you explain why, in truly objective terms?

Great response. Your guess is close enough, and it's simply because there's things I like about humanity, and following on from that I would consider anti-humanity views to be heretical towards what I consider to be respectable values. In truly objective terms though, I don't believe objective truths exist.

But what is it about biodiversity that you like? Your comment seemed to imply you believe it has some provable value or utility that you were unable to articulate (which I'm not saying it doesn't). But if value or utility isn't why you appreciate biodiversity, then why do you feel a need to justify your position?

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#109

Post by fuzzythinker »

Coolbeanstoo wrote: post #20

99% invisible did a good episode on the loss of Indian vultures and its effects. I found it quite interesting. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/towers-of-silence/

Radio Lab's "Corpse Demon" is great too.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon

Re: Decline of Indian vultures

#110

Post by VikingCoder »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #108
VikingCoder wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thank you for your perspective, and if you don't mind - I'd like to ask in return... Let me guess for a moment that you care very deeply that humanity not go extinct. Can you explain why, in truly objective terms?

Great response. Your guess is close enough, and it's simply because there's things I like about humanity, and following on from that I would consider anti-humanity views to be heretical towards what I consider to be respectable values. In truly objective terms though, I don't believe objective truths exist. But what is it about biodiversity that you like? Your comment seemed to imply you believe it has some provable…

I think biodiversity supports humanity in ways that I like, and I'm actually strongly suspicious that a great many humans would suffer if biodiversity were harmed, and in really chaotic ways.

Let alone the harm to many other species, in a horrific cascade.

I think within the bounds of some assumptions that objective truths exist. Within the Natural Numbers, 2 + 5 = 7.

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