11 ms·

I don't see how you could possibly consider the catastrophic nature of the situation only in terms of financial cost and not environmental. No amount of money c

by micmcg 16y ago

I don't see how you could possibly consider the catastrophic nature of the situation only in terms of financial cost and not environmental. No amount of money can bring back extinct species.

houseabsolute 16y ago
I care more about my fellow man's skin than some extinct species. All other things being equal extinctions are bad, but in my world it's lower priority than the losses that humans face (at some level of conversion). Anyway, if it makes you feel better, you can try to come up with an extinction's dollar value and add that in to your estimate. That sort of thing is perfectly valid. I suggest: "How much money would I pay (or advocate to be paid) to prevent this extinction?" Then do that for each extinction you believe is likely.
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  Hm, that's an interesting way of looking at it, to be polite. So, how much would you pay to prevent me from, say, burning the Mona Lisa? Or pulverizing the Statue of David? Or bombing the Sistine Chapel? I don't think it's valid at all to assume that everything can have a dollar value associated with it; that would mean that the word "priceless" would be meaningless. ...and I happen to think that the value of life in the Gulf is pretty priceless.
  - losvedir 16y ago
    Would you sacrifice your father, mother, sister, brother, etc, to save the Mona Lisa? Would you allow a type of fish to go extinct because some eccentric billionaire has a grudge against it and offers to end world hunger if you do? Not easy questions, and clearly not all "priceless" things are equal. But if you go about ranking things and comparing how much you want one thing or another, you're basically giving it a price. A loaf of bread isn't "worth" $4. It being $4 just means that you would like a loaf of bread approximately as much as a venti frappuccino, or that you'd be willing to work 15 mins (if you make $16/hr) for it. So, yes, I could assign dollar amounts to all of those questions. Think of it this way: What positive thing would you see done in exchange for the burning of the Mona Lisa? Nothing at all, really? You wouldn't have us land a man on Mars? Surely that would be as historic and beautiful as the Mona Lisa. What about free art supplies for life for an entire generation? Maybe that would inspire some artist to create something as breathtaking as the Mona Lisa. Now, once you have that minimum positive thing, ask how much it costs. (e.g. free art supplies for life for a generation: 100M people * $250/yr * 80 yrs = $2T.) That's the worth of "priceless" Mona Lisa.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - thaumaturgy 16y ago
      Philosophy is not my favorite subject. Here's the thing: in all of your examples, you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make. If I were offered the chance to trade the existence of an entire species in order to end world hunger, I would have to decline. I might forever regret the decision, but I have no natural right to make that decision. (Unless we're talking about mosquitoes. I would happily contribute to their extinction.) If philosophy isn't the proper arena for this crowd, then perhaps game theory is more applicable: if I decline that offer, then we're no worse off than before; however, if I accept, we may be better off -- if the gambit works -- unless there are consequences, in which case we may end up worse off. This is a classic high-risk/high-payoff situation, and I do not gamble. A loaf of bread is $4 not because it has anything to do with what I'm "willing" to pay for, but because someone has calculated that they can produce that product and sell it for that price and continue doing business. You might counter-argue that they only charge that because enough people are willing to pay for it, but the reality is macroeconomics is much different -- as is the reality of supermarket pricing. It is simply arrogant beyond belief to argue that any of us could make decisions that would trade something valuable to so many people, for something that might be valuable to other people. I mean, to bring this point home, how about if someone asks me if I'm willing to trade the lives of your family for the sake of feeding the homeless in my county? Based on your argument so far, that should be an easy choice for me to make ...
      - houseabsolute 16y ago
        > you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make Now you're just being difficult. This has nothing to do with philosophy: it's pure pragmatism. It's not about whether you have the right to make the choice or if it would be arrogant to do so. The question is: IF you had the power to make the choice and moreover were forced to take one of two alternatives, what would you choose? It's useful to make these kinds of unconscionable comparisons because sometimes, corporately, we DO have to choose between two unacceptable alternatives or evaluate the cost of disasters we would never choose to undergo had we the option. Or, more concretely: if the battery of safety precautions to reduce the odds of this happening by 90% would have cost $10 million per year, they would no doubt be worth it. But if they cost $1 trillion per year, they would probably not be worth it (unless you think the total value of all the offshore drilling ever done is less than the cost of this disaster). But even the latter judgment is a choice of one unconscionable option versus another.
  - houseabsolute 16y ago
    I am sure there is someone who would pay you $60 million to prevent burning the Mona Lisa. I don't value it that highly. David even less so. Sistine Chapel in my mind is worth more than both. You and I disagree on the ability to measure disasters in terms of money. OK, how about this: let's measure it in terms of Iraq wars. If you had the choice to put our national/world life through this N times or the Iraq war once, how large is N?
    - thaumaturgy 16y ago
      See my reply upthread.
  - Devilboy 16y ago
    We all like to think that life is 'priceless' but the truth is we put dollar values on people's lives routinely. Just ask insurance companies or the health care system or charities. There's no such thing as 'priceless'. The Mona Lisa is worth more than $10 million but certainly less than $10 billion. Same for David or the Sistine Chapel. I'm sure these treasures are also insured for some fixed amount too. We may call them 'priceless' mainly because they can't be replaced, not because they actually have infinite value.
    - brc 16y ago
      Actually : common misconception on the insurance for 'priceless' artworks. Most museums of the type of the Louvre carry no insurance. The premiums are out of their budgets, which are usually state / ticket sales funded, and there are major valuation problems on irreplaceable artworks, as you have pointed out. Musuems probably spend more money on public liability insurance than they do on their artworks. Instead they put the money they would have spent on premiums into fire and security systems, and 'self insure' to an extent. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if 'priceless' is actually originally a technical insurance term, like 'write off' that has entered the lexicon (probably not true, just using it to make a point) disclosure : used to do some coding for one of the worlds 'great' museums, learned a lot of this stuff.
  - ShardPhoenix 16y ago
    The amount that people are willing to pay to prevent the Mona Lisa burning is proportional to the amount that the Louvre spends on fire prevention, etc. You can put a value on anything, even if only implicitly. It's silly to call something "priceless" (except rhetorically.)
- mcantelon 16y ago
  The idea that extinction doesn't directly effect us presumes that we don't live in a complex system where ecological changes can have unpredictable, possibly dire consequences.
  - houseabsolute 16y ago
    I fully subscribe to your point of view. Now, what's the approximate probable cost of those unpredictable consequences?
    - mcantelon 16y ago
      Being unpredictable, the conservative approach would be to look at worst case scenarios. So far I haven't heard much and would be interested in these predictions as well.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - billswift 16y ago
        No, the conservative approach is to look at past extinctions and see that there is little or no impact. Too many extinctions in too short of time may have different results, but the environmentalist whining is just plain irrational.
        tod_ 16y ago
        Precisely what mass, multiple species, large-area extinction events are you using as your barometer? The environment is infrastructure. This is destroying huge swaths of it.
        mcantelon 16y ago
        It doesn't seem irrational to conclude that we live in a complex system that we don't understand and accelerating changes to this system, due to unprecedented human population and capabilities, could affect human survival. Ignoring risk isn't a conservative approach.
- wjy 16y ago
  I think many of us naturally feel that way. The problem is we rely on other species for our own survival. And the vast web of interconnected life is so complex we don't even know which species are crucial and which are not (we have an idea in some cases, but very few). Other species manufacture the air we breathe. The current inter-species balance in the oceans is why they're not teeming with jellyfish and nothing else. We absolutely rely on many other species, even ocean species, for our survival, and we don't completely understand which ones matter to us most. We are part of a huge interspecies network. We do not stand alone, even though it's easy to think so living among all our manufactured artifacts. Viscerally, I definitely care much more about other humans than I do about some eels or whatnot in the Gulf. But my relative sense of attachment to people and other species, evolved over eons, doesn't necessarily reflect the truth of our interdependence. EDIT: Grammar
electromagnetic 16y ago
Umm, is it just me or aren't they already doing IVF treatments between rhino species to use the more prevalent species to recover the virtually extinct species to aid in re-population efforts. Why is it such a hard leap that the DNA of recently extinct (as in holding the last one in your hands) cannot be recovered and used to perform similar methods. If you've got the species you can harvest the eggs and sperm and produce thousands of offspring. It's exceptionally naive to say "no amount of money can bring back extinct species" because you just have no grasp of what money can actually buy. If I can harvest the complete DNA of several animals from one species, including their mitochondrial, you can easily reproduce the species by emptying one of the species native eggs and filling it with the harvested foreign material, by all standards that I've read it should survive until gestation (assuming regular IVF failure rates for the species) and resurrect a species. You don't need an African Elephant to give birth to African Elephant babies, because an Asian Elephant will do a suitable job. In fact it's believed an African (IIRC) elephant would be a suitable enough host to resurrect a mammoth (mitochondrial DNA would be required due to its specializations). Please any amount of money can do virtually anything. It's currently engineeringly feasible to construct a gigantic nuclear powered mass driver on the moon to turn it into a world ship . . . or alternatively a massive billiard ball to explode mercury with. It's far, far, far from practical, but screw radiation shielding and deploy a few gigantic RTG's onto the moon and your money is getting what you want. Money is a direct equivalent to resources, which is the entire point of why we use it as a common currency instead of arguing over how much steel a bar of gold is worth and how many bars of gold it would take to turn said steel into a car. If you have the money/resources, you can do anything physically possible.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  it's believed an African (IIRC) elephant would be a suitable enough host to resurrect a mammoth People believe a lot of things. The difference between a scientist and an armchair philosopher is that the scientist knows how many tedious hours of painstaking work, followed by screwups, followed by more painstaking work, followed by the tiniest of advances, followed by a setback, followed by more work are necessary before the theoretically possible becomes the known to be possible... or, more likely, the oops, not quite so simple as we thought. Here's the state of the art in cross-species surrogate motherhood according to an actual biologist: http://www.askascientist.org/askascientist/answers/how_would_reproductive_technologies_such_as_artificial_insemination_crossspecies_nuclear_transfer.html http://www.askascientist.org/askascientist/answers/how_would... "There are few successful examples of cross-species nuclear transfer to date. The most publicized case was the cloning of a gaur, an endangered Asian ox, but the calf died two days after birth. Other efforts are ongoing, but questions remain about the incompatibility of nuclear DNA from one species with the mitochondrial DNA and cellular environment of another species." "Nuclear transfer has been suggested as a way to restore endangered or extinct species. There are a number of problems with this idea. First, the procedure is only possible when intact cells are still available, so long-extinct species cannot be restored. Second, it is difficult and expensive, so it would be feasible only for producing one animal or a few. With only a few animals to start a new population, there would be little genetic variation and the population would be susceptible to extinction factors such as disease. (Incidentally, if only one cloned animal was produced and then backcrossed to a closely related species, the effect on taxonomy would be negligible—similar to a single hybridization event.) Finally, cloning does not address the root cause of extinction, which is usually destruction of habitat. Despite technological advancements, habitat preservation is still the most effective way to save endangered species."
mkramlich 16y ago
Especially if one of the species turns out to be homo sapiens. :)

by micmcg 16y ago

I don't see how you could possibly consider the catastrophic nature of the situation only in terms of financial cost and not environmental. No amount of money can bring back extinct species.

houseabsolute 16y ago

I care more about my fellow man's skin than some extinct species. All other things being equal extinctions are bad, but in my world it's lower priority than the losses that humans face (at some level of conversion). Anyway, if it makes you feel better, you can try to come up with an extinction's dollar value and add that in to your estimate. That sort of thing is perfectly valid. I suggest: "How much money would I pay (or advocate to be paid) to prevent this extinction?" Then do that for each extinction you believe is likely.

thaumaturgy 16y ago
Hm, that's an interesting way of looking at it, to be polite. So, how much would you pay to prevent me from, say, burning the Mona Lisa? Or pulverizing the Statue of David? Or bombing the Sistine Chapel? I don't think it's valid at all to assume that everything can have a dollar value associated with it; that would mean that the word "priceless" would be meaningless. ...and I happen to think that the value of life in the Gulf is pretty priceless.
- losvedir 16y ago
  Would you sacrifice your father, mother, sister, brother, etc, to save the Mona Lisa? Would you allow a type of fish to go extinct because some eccentric billionaire has a grudge against it and offers to end world hunger if you do? Not easy questions, and clearly not all "priceless" things are equal. But if you go about ranking things and comparing how much you want one thing or another, you're basically giving it a price. A loaf of bread isn't "worth" $4. It being $4 just means that you would like a loaf of bread approximately as much as a venti frappuccino, or that you'd be willing to work 15 mins (if you make $16/hr) for it. So, yes, I could assign dollar amounts to all of those questions. Think of it this way: What positive thing would you see done in exchange for the burning of the Mona Lisa? Nothing at all, really? You wouldn't have us land a man on Mars? Surely that would be as historic and beautiful as the Mona Lisa. What about free art supplies for life for an entire generation? Maybe that would inspire some artist to create something as breathtaking as the Mona Lisa. Now, once you have that minimum positive thing, ask how much it costs. (e.g. free art supplies for life for a generation: 100M people * $250/yr * 80 yrs = $2T.) That's the worth of "priceless" Mona Lisa.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - thaumaturgy 16y ago
    Philosophy is not my favorite subject. Here's the thing: in all of your examples, you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make. If I were offered the chance to trade the existence of an entire species in order to end world hunger, I would have to decline. I might forever regret the decision, but I have no natural right to make that decision. (Unless we're talking about mosquitoes. I would happily contribute to their extinction.) If philosophy isn't the proper arena for this crowd, then perhaps game theory is more applicable: if I decline that offer, then we're no worse off than before; however, if I accept, we may be better off -- if the gambit works -- unless there are consequences, in which case we may end up worse off. This is a classic high-risk/high-payoff situation, and I do not gamble. A loaf of bread is $4 not because it has anything to do with what I'm "willing" to pay for, but because someone has calculated that they can produce that product and sell it for that price and continue doing business. You might counter-argue that they only charge that because enough people are willing to pay for it, but the reality is macroeconomics is much different -- as is the reality of supermarket pricing. It is simply arrogant beyond belief to argue that any of us could make decisions that would trade something valuable to so many people, for something that might be valuable to other people. I mean, to bring this point home, how about if someone asks me if I'm willing to trade the lives of your family for the sake of feeding the homeless in my county? Based on your argument so far, that should be an easy choice for me to make ...
    - houseabsolute 16y ago
      > you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make Now you're just being difficult. This has nothing to do with philosophy: it's pure pragmatism. It's not about whether you have the right to make the choice or if it would be arrogant to do so. The question is: IF you had the power to make the choice and moreover were forced to take one of two alternatives, what would you choose? It's useful to make these kinds of unconscionable comparisons because sometimes, corporately, we DO have to choose between two unacceptable alternatives or evaluate the cost of disasters we would never choose to undergo had we the option. Or, more concretely: if the battery of safety precautions to reduce the odds of this happening by 90% would have cost $10 million per year, they would no doubt be worth it. But if they cost $1 trillion per year, they would probably not be worth it (unless you think the total value of all the offshore drilling ever done is less than the cost of this disaster). But even the latter judgment is a choice of one unconscionable option versus another.
- houseabsolute 16y ago
  I am sure there is someone who would pay you $60 million to prevent burning the Mona Lisa. I don't value it that highly. David even less so. Sistine Chapel in my mind is worth more than both. You and I disagree on the ability to measure disasters in terms of money. OK, how about this: let's measure it in terms of Iraq wars. If you had the choice to put our national/world life through this N times or the Iraq war once, how large is N?
  - thaumaturgy 16y ago
    See my reply upthread.
- Devilboy 16y ago
  We all like to think that life is 'priceless' but the truth is we put dollar values on people's lives routinely. Just ask insurance companies or the health care system or charities. There's no such thing as 'priceless'. The Mona Lisa is worth more than $10 million but certainly less than $10 billion. Same for David or the Sistine Chapel. I'm sure these treasures are also insured for some fixed amount too. We may call them 'priceless' mainly because they can't be replaced, not because they actually have infinite value.
  - brc 16y ago
    Actually : common misconception on the insurance for 'priceless' artworks. Most museums of the type of the Louvre carry no insurance. The premiums are out of their budgets, which are usually state / ticket sales funded, and there are major valuation problems on irreplaceable artworks, as you have pointed out. Musuems probably spend more money on public liability insurance than they do on their artworks. Instead they put the money they would have spent on premiums into fire and security systems, and 'self insure' to an extent. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if 'priceless' is actually originally a technical insurance term, like 'write off' that has entered the lexicon (probably not true, just using it to make a point) disclosure : used to do some coding for one of the worlds 'great' museums, learned a lot of this stuff.
- ShardPhoenix 16y ago
  The amount that people are willing to pay to prevent the Mona Lisa burning is proportional to the amount that the Louvre spends on fire prevention, etc. You can put a value on anything, even if only implicitly. It's silly to call something "priceless" (except rhetorically.)
mcantelon 16y ago
The idea that extinction doesn't directly effect us presumes that we don't live in a complex system where ecological changes can have unpredictable, possibly dire consequences.
- houseabsolute 16y ago
  I fully subscribe to your point of view. Now, what's the approximate probable cost of those unpredictable consequences?
  - mcantelon 16y ago
    Being unpredictable, the conservative approach would be to look at worst case scenarios. So far I haven't heard much and would be interested in these predictions as well.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - billswift 16y ago
      No, the conservative approach is to look at past extinctions and see that there is little or no impact. Too many extinctions in too short of time may have different results, but the environmentalist whining is just plain irrational.
      - tod_ 16y ago
        Precisely what mass, multiple species, large-area extinction events are you using as your barometer? The environment is infrastructure. This is destroying huge swaths of it.
      - mcantelon 16y ago
        It doesn't seem irrational to conclude that we live in a complex system that we don't understand and accelerating changes to this system, due to unprecedented human population and capabilities, could affect human survival. Ignoring risk isn't a conservative approach.
wjy 16y ago
I think many of us naturally feel that way. The problem is we rely on other species for our own survival. And the vast web of interconnected life is so complex we don't even know which species are crucial and which are not (we have an idea in some cases, but very few). Other species manufacture the air we breathe. The current inter-species balance in the oceans is why they're not teeming with jellyfish and nothing else. We absolutely rely on many other species, even ocean species, for our survival, and we don't completely understand which ones matter to us most. We are part of a huge interspecies network. We do not stand alone, even though it's easy to think so living among all our manufactured artifacts. Viscerally, I definitely care much more about other humans than I do about some eels or whatnot in the Gulf. But my relative sense of attachment to people and other species, evolved over eons, doesn't necessarily reflect the truth of our interdependence. EDIT: Grammar

electromagnetic 16y ago

Umm, is it just me or aren't they already doing IVF treatments between rhino species to use the more prevalent species to recover the virtually extinct species to aid in re-population efforts. Why is it such a hard leap that the DNA of recently extinct (as in holding the last one in your hands) cannot be recovered and used to perform similar methods. If you've got the species you can harvest the eggs and sperm and produce thousands of offspring. It's exceptionally naive to say "no amount of money can bring back extinct species" because you just have no grasp of what money can actually buy. If I can harvest the complete DNA of several animals from one species, including their mitochondrial, you can easily reproduce the species by emptying one of the species native eggs and filling it with the harvested foreign material, by all standards that I've read it should survive until gestation (assuming regular IVF failure rates for the species) and resurrect a species. You don't need an African Elephant to give birth to African Elephant babies, because an Asian Elephant will do a suitable job. In fact it's believed an African (IIRC) elephant would be a suitable enough host to resurrect a mammoth (mitochondrial DNA would be required due to its specializations). Please any amount of money can do virtually anything. It's currently engineeringly feasible to construct a gigantic nuclear powered mass driver on the moon to turn it into a world ship . . . or alternatively a massive billiard ball to explode mercury with. It's far, far, far from practical, but screw radiation shielding and deploy a few gigantic RTG's onto the moon and your money is getting what you want. Money is a direct equivalent to resources, which is the entire point of why we use it as a common currency instead of arguing over how much steel a bar of gold is worth and how many bars of gold it would take to turn said steel into a car. If you have the money/resources, you can do anything physically possible.

mechanical_fish 16y ago
it's believed an African (IIRC) elephant would be a suitable enough host to resurrect a mammoth People believe a lot of things. The difference between a scientist and an armchair philosopher is that the scientist knows how many tedious hours of painstaking work, followed by screwups, followed by more painstaking work, followed by the tiniest of advances, followed by a setback, followed by more work are necessary before the theoretically possible becomes the known to be possible... or, more likely, the oops, not quite so simple as we thought. Here's the state of the art in cross-species surrogate motherhood according to an actual biologist: http://www.askascientist.org/askascientist/answers/how_would_reproductive_technologies_such_as_artificial_insemination_crossspecies_nuclear_transfer.html http://www.askascientist.org/askascientist/answers/how_would... "There are few successful examples of cross-species nuclear transfer to date. The most publicized case was the cloning of a gaur, an endangered Asian ox, but the calf died two days after birth. Other efforts are ongoing, but questions remain about the incompatibility of nuclear DNA from one species with the mitochondrial DNA and cellular environment of another species." "Nuclear transfer has been suggested as a way to restore endangered or extinct species. There are a number of problems with this idea. First, the procedure is only possible when intact cells are still available, so long-extinct species cannot be restored. Second, it is difficult and expensive, so it would be feasible only for producing one animal or a few. With only a few animals to start a new population, there would be little genetic variation and the population would be susceptible to extinction factors such as disease. (Incidentally, if only one cloned animal was produced and then backcrossed to a closely related species, the effect on taxonomy would be negligible—similar to a single hybridization event.) Finally, cloning does not address the root cause of extinction, which is usually destruction of habitat. Despite technological advancements, habitat preservation is still the most effective way to save endangered species."

mkramlich 16y ago

Especially if one of the species turns out to be homo sapiens. :)