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GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

bbc.co.uk

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Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#131

Post by enraged_camel »

jeffdavis wrote: post #118
Kalium wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there might be a higher level question at hand here. What level of caution is appropriate when the deliberate choice of inaction has a price tag of six digits of lives attached? What level of risk and potentially unforeseen consequences are we willing to accept? This is not an idle question. It's a critical question for informing a decision-making framework that rests on calculation. Which we need here - I th…

It sounds like you want to take a calculated risk. I'm not convinced that this is a calculated risk -- it's an unbounded risk. What if it, for example, kills of pretty much all of the insects over a large part of the earth?

These types of examples aren’t useful though because you can make up any number of them, and make them as extreme as you want.

Risk management, on the other hand, is about determining risks that are reasonably likely, and figuring out contingencies and mitigation strategies.

In your opinion, is it reasonably likely that a fungi that is engineered to kill a specific species of insect (and only those carrying a specific disease) can somehow go out of control and end up killing all insects on the planet? In my opinion, it is not.

Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#132

Post by fiter »

enraged_camel wrote: post #131
jeffdavis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you want to take a calculated risk. I'm not convinced that this is a calculated risk -- it's an unbounded risk. What if it, for example, kills of pretty much all of the insects over a large part of the earth?

These types of examples aren’t useful though because you can make up any number of them, and make them as extreme as you want. Risk management, on the other hand, is about determining risks that are reasonably likely , and figuring out contingencies and mitigation strategies. In your opinion, is it reasonably likely that a fungi that is engineered to kill a specific species of insect (and only those carrying a specif…

I think there are a number of people waking up to the level of concern that you need to put on unbounded risks. See the popular book, The Black Swan. To throw out these large but improbable risks is taking a large part out of these distributions. Maybe it's not a good idea.

Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#133

Post by enraged_camel »

fiter wrote: post #132
enraged_camel wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These types of examples aren’t useful though because you can make up any number of them, and make them as extreme as you want. Risk management, on the other hand, is about determining risks that are reasonably likely , and figuring out contingencies and mitigation strategies. In your opinion, is it reasonably likely that a fungi that is engineered to kill a specific species of insect (and only those carrying a specif…

I think there are a number of people waking up to the level of concern that you need to put on unbounded risks. See the popular book, The Black Swan. To throw out these large but improbable risks is taking a large part out of these distributions. Maybe it's not a good idea.

On the other hand, we cannot afford to be paralyzed by concerns about black swans. If we did, nothing would get done.

Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#135

Post by senorjazz »

ashildr wrote: post #51
throwaway13337 wrote: post #17

Predictable negativity from the comments here ignores that over one million people die of malaria per year. Not using what we can against something this horrible is a choice, too. And one that has the greater of consequences. It's easy to poke holes in things from the sidelines. That action is actively causing us to drag our feet and kill a lot of people. It should also be noted that mosquitoes are not depended on as…

- Something has to be done. - This is something. - Therefore it has to be done.

free mosquito nets would drastically get the death rate down

Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#136

Post by beat »

Kliment wrote: post #127
beat wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think the gap is compounding? Is that fact-based, or feelings-based? I'd recommend reading Factfulness , by Hans Rosling. It'll cause you to rethink some things. edit: Here's an interesting fact for you. In the late 1990s, the global extreme poverty rate (around $1.80/day in today's dollars) was 29%. Today, it's under 9%. We've wiped out two thirds of the world's extreme poverty in twenty years. https:…

Improvements in extreme poverty rate are neither here nor there when talking about whether the long-term effects of colonialism cause the speed of long-term development in former colonies to be slower. This is all that is necessary for wealth, income and power gaps to compound.

I would argue that, at the moment, economic development of former colonies is happening considerably faster than development in the former colonizers. And the evidence agrees with me. Take China, for example. Per capita income there has grown from $89 in 1960 to over $9000 today (constant 2018 dollars), a 100x increase. Over the same period, US per capita income grew from $3000 to $60,000, a 20x increase. The number of nations mired in desperate poverty drops every year, and the number of nations improving their economies rapidly grows.

The gap is closing.

Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#138

Post by fiter »

enraged_camel wrote: post #133
fiter wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are a number of people waking up to the level of concern that you need to put on unbounded risks. See the popular book, The Black Swan. To throw out these large but improbable risks is taking a large part out of these distributions. Maybe it's not a good idea.

On the other hand, we cannot afford to be paralyzed by concerns about black swans. If we did, nothing would get done.

I don't think the book and others with similar thoughts suggest anything like being paralyzed with fear, so we should be OK here.

Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#139

Post by beat »

zapita wrote: post #125
beat wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think the gap is compounding? Is that fact-based, or feelings-based? I'd recommend reading Factfulness , by Hans Rosling. It'll cause you to rethink some things. edit: Here's an interesting fact for you. In the late 1990s, the global extreme poverty rate (around $1.80/day in today's dollars) was 29%. Today, it's under 9%. We've wiped out two thirds of the world's extreme poverty in twenty years. https:…

> What makes you think the gap is compounding? Is that fact-based, or feelings-based? What a strange way to engage in a debate. I already explained why I think the gap is compounding. Feel free to offer a constructive rebuttal if you disagree. > We've wiped out two thirds of the world's extreme poverty in twenty years. That is fantastic. How does it relate to the compounding power gap we’re discussing?

If you read Factfulness, you'll find that it's not a strange way to engage at all. One thing Hans Rosling proved and taught is that even well-educated, caring, attentive people are incredibly wrong about simple facts about global economics and health - so much so that, on his multiple-choice questions, every group he examined performed worse on their answers than if they simply guessed at random.

So yes, "Is this belief feelings-based?" is an incredibly important question.

So how does the question of the rapid reduction of extreme poverty relate to the "compounding power gap"? First, it shows that progress is being made, that the poorest of the poor are doing much better than they were as recently as two decades ago.

But more importantly, I do not believe you have demonstrated with facts and evidence that there is a "compounding power gap". You believe that there is compounding power gap, based on the fact that there is a power gap at all. But actual, fact-based evidence suggests that power gap (measuring by dollars as a proxy, since you didn't offer a standard of measurement for your power gap) is decreasing, and rapidly. With some exceptions, the poorer nations are increasing their wealth at a far faster rate than richer nations are.

Consider this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_...

It's a list of countries by GDP growth rate. I assume you're familiar with the miracle of compounding, since you used that word.

The first European country on the list is Ireland, at 13. The next is Hungary, at 40. The first former colonial power is the US, at 107, more than halfway down the list.

If you don't think that economic growth is a reasonable proxy for "compounding power gap", then what is?

Re: GM fungus can rapidly kill mosquitoes that spread malaria, study suggests

#140

Post by saulrh »

craigsmansion wrote: post #115
saulrh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like arguing that the Model T demonstrates that cars will never be safe enough to drive. Yes, there are ways to do this wrong. We have a much better idea what they are and our standards for precision and reliability are much higher. The 1940s are long gone and we aren't the baby boomers. We require seat belts in all cars, houses to be built to fire and electrical codes, and household chemicals to have plain l…

Your counter examples are about the mitigation of unexpected and unwanted effects. These were implemented after the fact. There are situations that have no possibility of redress. Your paragraph about ecological impact can serve as an example of the lurking danger. I wasn't even concerned about ecological impact. My concern was about artificially creating a resistant species. That's one of the pitfalls here. We're ta…

> I wasn't even concerned about ecological impact.

I spat out a post in ten minutes that looked further out than you did. I wasn't even trying.

The people that actually do this stuff are trained, credentialed biologists and ecologists that have taken courses on this and spend literal decades reading studies about proposals and going down checklists of things that have caused problems in the past. It is literally their job to make sure nobody can say "You didn't consider X" during review, on the news, or in court.

Back in tenth grade I took an honors biology course. The year's final project was to write an environmental impact statement for, if I recall correctly, chopping down twenty or thirty trees in a nearby park. In retrospect, we worked off what I suspect was a massively stripped-down version of a tiny fraction of the real rules.

It took five of us a month and we wrote a hundred pages single-spaced.

> So do most programmers...

I certainly won't argue that the field of software engineering doesn't need more rigor - there are reasons that I prefer writing cleaner code than my coworkers often do. But this proposal isn't operating in the same regime I usually do.

I mangle data at scale for a fuzzy rules-engine type thing. I bet you do something with comparable correctness requirements. There are times I've looked at a bug, looked at the logs, figured out the underlying conditions, estimated the future occurrence, concluded that I spent more money just looking at the logs than it would cost to remediate the data by hand for the next ten years, and estimated that it'd take me three times as long to actually fix it. I do know what happens when my solutions aren't good enough, and I bet you do too.

Aerospace and defense programmers operate in a regime far more like what we see with these environmental proposals. And guess what? They know what happens when their code isn't good enough... and they have huge checklists that they go down for every single change and have their code audited regularly and tested obscenely thoroughly and spend weeks tracking down tiny bugs, stamping them out, and adding them to the checklist.

(Before you bring up the recent boeing failures: Take a look at the politics and incentives. Where did the economic and political incentives lie there? Where do you think the economic and political incentives lie for a proposal like this? Especially given how much environmental fearmongering we see as a result of movies like Jurassic Park? Do you think that anyone would dare approve a project like this with anything less than every single i dotted and every single t crossed?)

> but because it's new we're not addressing the same issue.

Development of resistance is such a well-known failure mode for pest-control tools that wikipedia's page on DDT has a whole second-level paragraph titled "Mosquito resistance".

Why do you think that evolution and resistance are novel failure modes, and why do you think they'd have been missed in the analysis?

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