4 ms·

> “When something new and revolutionary comes along, the immediate reaction of a lot of people is to say: ‘Wait.’,” I don't think novelty is the problem here.

> “When something new and revolutionary comes along, the immediate reaction of a lot of people is to say: ‘Wait.’,” I don't think novelty is the problem here. Humans have a genuinely terrible track record of ecosystem engineering. Unintended consequences are pretty common.

mc32 5y ago
Hmmmm African killer bees... On the other hand, these are males whose female offspring are designed to die. If they were regular male mosquitoes their female offspring would have the same survival rate as males. So the bad scenario is the female offspring survive as normal. The super bad scenario is they only beget female mosquitoes I guess. Yes that would be worse.
- silasdavis 5y ago
  We can make a better disaster film script than that. How about some rare second generation females survive then turn out to be far more potent disease carriers and rebuild a population of super mosquitoes in their place. Mosquitoes are buggers though.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    I liked the part where the infertility genes somehow manage to contaminate the human DNA and both humans and condom market collapse at the same time, yep...
    - breischl 5y ago
      >both humans and condom market collapse at the same time lol, I like your framing of that. I can just picture the headlines: HUMANITY TO BE ERADICATED!!!!! Also, condom sales fall
  - wildmanx 5y ago
    Or what about this experiment actually working, this specific species going extinct (or at least driven out), and that 4% nice that's now empty gets taken over by another type of mosquitoes or other type of insect that has the bad properties you describe? Not too unlikely as we tend to have no clue what will happen when we eco-engineer something away. And if we think we have a clue, it tends to be wrong. Or what about this: they go extinct/away and it turns out there was some predator that now doesn't get food anymore and is decimated while their competition gets now out of hand? Next pest please.
csallen 5y ago
How common? What's the denominator? It's one thing to say that failure happens often, but what matters is the ratio: the number of failures relative to the number of successes. Denominator blindness leads to people assessing risk solely based on how vividly they can recall failures. Which in turn leads to all sorts of irrational fears and behaviors.
- aledalgrande 5y ago
  Don't think relative matters much if you have a catastrophic event. One is enough. This hopefully won't have such an impact though. I'd be more worried with nanomachines trained to consume carbon molecules to clean up oil from the ocean which started to eat all organic matter because of a Friday deploy bug.
- akamaka 5y ago
  The probability of this particular project failing is unrelated to the fraction of previous failures. Those past failures serve only as a warning. When you jump out of a plane, you don’t just say “99.999% of people survived this before, so I’ll probably be fine”, you carefully triple-check your gear, and you abort if you get a gut feeling something isn’t right.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  > leads to all sorts of irrational fears and behaviors. Poverty is real, and people fear being poor for good reasons. Losing millions each year because an idiot released a toad, a rabbit, a starling or a snail is a real fear in the real world. People can choose not to see it or to laugh about it, but they will still must to pay, as their grandpas did, and their grandsons will do. Messing with mammals is a thing. Messing with insects, bacteria or virus is a totally new level.
DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
> Unintended consequences are pretty common. Unintended consequences are the norm. Most discoveries were a product of them. We're just good at hiding the fact and convincing ourselves that it was all planned in advance as part of our genius. But it's all chaos.
Grustaf 5y ago
> > “When something new and revolutionary comes along, the immediate reaction of a lot of people is to say: ‘Wait.’,” ...which is obviously a very sensible approach.
Taylor_OD 5y ago
We have whole genres of fiction dedicated to how badly we will fuck this up.

mc32 5y ago

Hmmmm African killer bees... On the other hand, these are males whose female offspring are designed to die. If they were regular male mosquitoes their female offspring would have the same survival rate as males. So the bad scenario is the female offspring survive as normal. The super bad scenario is they only beget female mosquitoes I guess. Yes that would be worse.

silasdavis 5y ago
We can make a better disaster film script than that. How about some rare second generation females survive then turn out to be far more potent disease carriers and rebuild a population of super mosquitoes in their place. Mosquitoes are buggers though.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  I liked the part where the infertility genes somehow manage to contaminate the human DNA and both humans and condom market collapse at the same time, yep...
  - breischl 5y ago
    >both humans and condom market collapse at the same time lol, I like your framing of that. I can just picture the headlines: HUMANITY TO BE ERADICATED!!!!! Also, condom sales fall
- wildmanx 5y ago
  Or what about this experiment actually working, this specific species going extinct (or at least driven out), and that 4% nice that's now empty gets taken over by another type of mosquitoes or other type of insect that has the bad properties you describe? Not too unlikely as we tend to have no clue what will happen when we eco-engineer something away. And if we think we have a clue, it tends to be wrong. Or what about this: they go extinct/away and it turns out there was some predator that now doesn't get food anymore and is decimated while their competition gets now out of hand? Next pest please.

csallen 5y ago

How common? What's the denominator? It's one thing to say that failure happens often, but what matters is the ratio: the number of failures relative to the number of successes. Denominator blindness leads to people assessing risk solely based on how vividly they can recall failures. Which in turn leads to all sorts of irrational fears and behaviors.

aledalgrande 5y ago
Don't think relative matters much if you have a catastrophic event. One is enough. This hopefully won't have such an impact though. I'd be more worried with nanomachines trained to consume carbon molecules to clean up oil from the ocean which started to eat all organic matter because of a Friday deploy bug.
akamaka 5y ago
The probability of this particular project failing is unrelated to the fraction of previous failures. Those past failures serve only as a warning. When you jump out of a plane, you don’t just say “99.999% of people survived this before, so I’ll probably be fine”, you carefully triple-check your gear, and you abort if you get a gut feeling something isn’t right.
pvaldes 5y ago
> leads to all sorts of irrational fears and behaviors. Poverty is real, and people fear being poor for good reasons. Losing millions each year because an idiot released a toad, a rabbit, a starling or a snail is a real fear in the real world. People can choose not to see it or to laugh about it, but they will still must to pay, as their grandpas did, and their grandsons will do. Messing with mammals is a thing. Messing with insects, bacteria or virus is a totally new level.

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago

> Unintended consequences are pretty common. Unintended consequences are the norm. Most discoveries were a product of them. We're just good at hiding the fact and convincing ourselves that it was all planned in advance as part of our genius. But it's all chaos.

Grustaf 5y ago

> > “When something new and revolutionary comes along, the immediate reaction of a lot of people is to say: ‘Wait.’,” ...which is obviously a very sensible approach.

Taylor_OD 5y ago

We have whole genres of fiction dedicated to how badly we will fuck this up.