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We think with our weak technologies and chemistries that we can play God. However, it is so far from the truth - in an attempt to create more vegetation we hav

We think with our weak technologies and chemistries that we can play God. However, it is so far from the truth - in an attempt to create more vegetation we have decreased a critical component needed to help said vegetation grow. Technology should be used carefully when in the environment of the unknown. Trials and observations should be conducted in limited capacity with a long window of study. Only then can we know of the consequences for our actions of disrupting naturally evolved and perfected equilibriums - be it that of the Earth or man’s immune system.

randomopining 5y ago
And the complex supply chains to supply these cutting edge industries are so fragile, they would crumble easily when the climate turns chaotic.
ethbr0 5y ago
> Technology should be used carefully when in the environment of the unknown. Trials and observations should be conducted in limited capacity with a long window of study A laudable goal. And yet, without the agricultural revolution of the 1960s, we wouldn't have grocery stores today with well-stocked shelves. Cautiousness has its own price.
- markdown 5y ago
  Have you seen the grocery stores today? I mean really stopped and taken a good hard look at what's on them? Mostly garbage. Garbage. And then you have this: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/q4aeuc/every_single_night_at_amazon_fresh_thrown_out_5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/q4aeuc/e...
  - californical 5y ago
    It’s totally true. I’ve always liked the advice that you should mostly walk around the perimeter of the store, and only go into the middle part (aisles) when you have some specific need (canned veggies, beans, pasta). It obviously depends a bit on your store’s layout, but I’ve found the advice to be almost universal. The aisles contain all of the junk (an unbelievable amount of junk), and the good fresh ingredients — fruit, veggies, dairy, breads, meats — are around the outside.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    The Reddit link is irrelevant without knowing the size of the operation and the normal amounts of waste. If people think they can design systems that can predict demand perfectly and result in no errors, perhaps they should get a job at a grocery store or start their own.
    - markdown 5y ago
      The OP (who works at that shop and knows the demand and supply), explained in the post that they have a massive freezer that's mostly empty they could throw this stuff into for a day or so until it's picked up by soup kitchens. The choice to discard perfectly good food is a diabolic one.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        It’s also discussed in the thread that other major retailer worldwide do the same thing. You can choose to think that there are evil people intentionally choosing to throw the food away deriving happiness from others’ hunger. Or you can investigate the issue and determine that there is a good reason (aka probability and cost of liability is too high compared to throwing it away). Retail businesses operate on razor thin margins where a few missteps would kill them, and it is pretty naive to think the professionals in that business do not know how to run their own business.
        markdown 5y ago
        > It’s also discussed in the thread that other major retailer worldwide do the same thing There are other evil people out there so this is ok? Is that your argument? > There are evil people intentionally choosing to throw the food away deriving happiness from others’ hunger What are they, if not evil, because that's exactly what they're doing... throwing good food away while people in the neighbourhood go hungry. > Or you can investigate the issue and determine that there is a good reason But I have investigated the reason, and it isn't a good one. This food is thrown out BEFORE expiry date. This means that at the moment of destruction, it was completely legal to sell the food. If it was legal to sell, it was legal to give away. And I'm not saying that they should let dumpster divers just come and take what they want. I'm saying that there are organisations (soup kitchens, etc) that you can have legal agreements with that leave Amazon free of liability, just as if they'd be free of liability if they sold the food. To not do this is evil. > Retail businesses operate on razor thin margins where a few missteps would kill them Selling food before it's best-before/expiry date is legal and is the core function of every retail business. They could sell this food for a $0.01 to a food kitchen and it would be no more a misstep or risk than if they sold it to any other customer. > it is pretty naive to think the professionals in that business do not know how to run their own business I said nothing of the sort. They know exactly how to run their own business. But they're evil people who are letting starving people suffer while they throw out perfectly good, FDA approved, non-expired, healthy food.
- Retric 5y ago
  That was ~60 years ago, it’s perfectly reasonable to use a 20 year time horizon for testing changes to the food supply etc. Progress isn’t just about whatever the new thing is it’s about finding something actually better.
  - melony 5y ago
    says Lysenko.
- quotemstr 5y ago
  > And yet, without the agricultural revolution of the 1960s, we wouldn't have grocery stores today with well-stocked shelves. It's not that we wouldn't have well-stocked shelves: it's that we wouldn't be alive. We can feed as many people as we do because of the incredible advances we've made in agricultural sciences. Without those, there just wouldn't be enough calories to go around. Does the sum of all the joys of billions of people mean nothing to everyone who denounces modern agriculture? All this invective against technology is sophomoric, short-sighted, and fundamentally unserious, and if we followed the recommendations of people to whom science is a bad thing, just "playing god", then a huge number of us would simply cease to exist.
  - carapace 5y ago
    Ecology is a science. > Does the sum of all the joys of billions of people mean nothing to everyone who denounces modern agriculture? The thing about that is that the story isn't over yet. Yes, billions of people owe their lives to the Haber–Bosch process (et. al., I'm obviously simplifying here) but if billions of people die due to ecological and economic collapse, is it really all worth it? As a concrete counter-example to modern mass agriculture there are ecological systems of food production that result in high yields while increasing fertility, biodiversity, and biomass (such as Permaculture, Syntropic and Regenerative agriculture, etc.) So we can have our both well-stocked grocery shelves and healthy ecosystems.
    - bmitc 5y ago
      Additionally, it seems the production of industrial ammonia is a major CO2 emitter. https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-ammonia-production-emits-CO2/97/i24 https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-a...
  - bmitc 5y ago
    Do you have any references for these statements? I have never even heard that things were apparently so dire in the 60s. Does your sentiment that we apparently couldn’t feed ourselves take into account population growth? What if the population had simply not grown as it did? My current understanding is that the U.S. overproduces what it needs, exports the excess at dirt cheap prices, killing off developing countries’ farmer livelihoods. So in the U.S., there’s multiple birds killed with one stone.
tootie 5y ago
Honestly, we are really pretty good at playing god. Killing off a species of bee is sad and may have some unintended consequences but it hasn't put a dent in our ability to engineer the earth to suit our needs. The problem is motives and objectives. We have created the incentives to extract resources and not to protect organisms. So that's what we do.
- 09bjb 5y ago
  > but it hasn't put a dent in our ability to engineer the earth to suit our needs We'll see about that when most soil is barren and most bees are gone. That is, very shortly.
0942v8653 5y ago
Not even limited trials with a long window of study (how long?) will prevent this. Science itself is a non-holistic way of looking at the world, blind to what is not measured. Concerning this example, it seems like a predictable effect of pesticides and global trade -- not unexpected, though perhaps not hoped for. Instead, the principle of caution must be applied when using technology. Pesticides that increase yield or decrease risk by only 10% may not be necessary at all. Any industrial action will disrupt Earth's equilibriums given the high level of consumption those in the developed world currently enjoy.
- speedybird 5y ago
  > Science itself is a non-holistic way of looking at the world, blind to what is not measured. This is unfortunately a broad class of error; qualitative metrics which are difficult to measure and quantify get brushed aside by people who want to make rational data-driven decisions. Robert McNamara became infamous for this; the 'data driven' way he tried to manage the Vietnam War focused on hard quantitative metrics, like bodycounts, and de-emphasized or ignored qualitative metrics like popular opinion in Vietnam and America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy In the software industry, those that would rely on instrumentation and telemetry to guide product development often repeat the same mistakes. Many times I've seen user feedback ignored, derided, and demeaned. "Users are dumb, they don't know what they want. Ask users what they want and they'll ask for a faster horse." These ostensibly rational data-driven designers are ironically irrational because they ignore the well established limitations of their data-driven approach.
quotemstr 5y ago
> We think with our weak technologies and chemistries that we can play God. We can play God, do play God, and will continue play God. People used to think of electricity as the rage of an angry God. Now you're raging against progress on a device that harnesses lightning at a quantum scale in ways unthinkable even 50 years ago. Do you have no appreciation whatsoever for how much good it does to expand humanity's capabilities? Can you see only the downsides? The people complaining about technology and progress should propose actual fixes for the problems that appear instead of braying from the sidelines about how nobody should ever do anything.
- titzer 5y ago
  We live in a truly remarkable universe and Science is our best method of repeatable, measurable progress. But Science is a method in service of our desires, and incentives drive our economic systems. Science has been put in service of extracting maximum profit and maximum growth. One small part of that is efficiency in production. That efficiency has given rise to the broad material wealth that we enjoy today. But Science has not been put in service of understanding what is good for humans psychologically, spiritually, or even biologically. To the extent that it has, we are overwhelmed and outmatched by powerful economic forces in service of the profit motive. A profit motive that has locked us into dreams of perpetual exponential growth of a fundamental anti-biological system of roadways, electricity, and food production that has us first harvesting and then paving the biosphere for profit. And then we get comments like yours, thankfully and rightly downvoted. Comments trying to stir up more shouting and polarization and finger pointing. In pursuit of that cathartic polarization, your comment is really just support of an absurd, extremist viewpoint that must have as a starting point a staggering ignorance about what humanity is currently smashing to pieces in its pursuit of material wealth, coupled with a willful ignorance to reflect on it. The cost we exact on our planet is enormous.
  - quotemstr 5y ago
    > Science has been put in service of extracting maximum profit and maximum growth. One small part of that is efficiency in production. That efficiency has given rise to the broad material wealth that we enjoy today. But Science has not been put in service of understanding what is good for humans psychologically, spiritually, or even biologically What is profitable is what is good. That's the beautiful thing about markets and prices: they force people to be honest about their preferences. When someone pays money for something, that means that what he's getting in exchange is good for him. Who are you to argue otherwise? Why should your aesthetic ideals of humanity's future override the actual preferences of real people as expressed through their market behavior? This idea that we can distinguish what is right from what is profitable is moralistic arrogance. > anti-biological system of roadways, electricity, and food production When I say that a certain strain of environmentalist is anti-human, I'm talking about people who would write about roads and electricity as if they were grand mistakes and should be undone. That's absurd. People who think this way can never be allowed to have power. If they got it, they'd ruin billions of lives. > And then we get comments like yours, thankfully and rightly downvoted. If your ideas can be supported only by censoring those who disagree, your ideas are weak and deserve to fail. > The cost we exact on our planet is enormous. The planet is there for us. We have no obligation not to impose costs on "the planet" any more than we have an obligation not to inconvenience the air we breathe or the dirt we stand on. This idea that we need to trade off interests of "the planet" against those of people is absurd. Ecological preservation might be justified in some cases in the interest of people, but we are under no obligation whatsoever to negotiate with Gaia for human welfare.

randomopining 5y ago

And the complex supply chains to supply these cutting edge industries are so fragile, they would crumble easily when the climate turns chaotic.

ethbr0 5y ago

> Technology should be used carefully when in the environment of the unknown. Trials and observations should be conducted in limited capacity with a long window of study A laudable goal. And yet, without the agricultural revolution of the 1960s, we wouldn't have grocery stores today with well-stocked shelves. Cautiousness has its own price.

markdown 5y ago
Have you seen the grocery stores today? I mean really stopped and taken a good hard look at what's on them? Mostly garbage. Garbage. And then you have this: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/q4aeuc/every_single_night_at_amazon_fresh_thrown_out_5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/q4aeuc/e...
- californical 5y ago
  It’s totally true. I’ve always liked the advice that you should mostly walk around the perimeter of the store, and only go into the middle part (aisles) when you have some specific need (canned veggies, beans, pasta). It obviously depends a bit on your store’s layout, but I’ve found the advice to be almost universal. The aisles contain all of the junk (an unbelievable amount of junk), and the good fresh ingredients — fruit, veggies, dairy, breads, meats — are around the outside.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  The Reddit link is irrelevant without knowing the size of the operation and the normal amounts of waste. If people think they can design systems that can predict demand perfectly and result in no errors, perhaps they should get a job at a grocery store or start their own.
  - markdown 5y ago
    The OP (who works at that shop and knows the demand and supply), explained in the post that they have a massive freezer that's mostly empty they could throw this stuff into for a day or so until it's picked up by soup kitchens. The choice to discard perfectly good food is a diabolic one.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      It’s also discussed in the thread that other major retailer worldwide do the same thing. You can choose to think that there are evil people intentionally choosing to throw the food away deriving happiness from others’ hunger. Or you can investigate the issue and determine that there is a good reason (aka probability and cost of liability is too high compared to throwing it away). Retail businesses operate on razor thin margins where a few missteps would kill them, and it is pretty naive to think the professionals in that business do not know how to run their own business.
      - markdown 5y ago
        > It’s also discussed in the thread that other major retailer worldwide do the same thing There are other evil people out there so this is ok? Is that your argument? > There are evil people intentionally choosing to throw the food away deriving happiness from others’ hunger What are they, if not evil, because that's exactly what they're doing... throwing good food away while people in the neighbourhood go hungry. > Or you can investigate the issue and determine that there is a good reason But I have investigated the reason, and it isn't a good one. This food is thrown out BEFORE expiry date. This means that at the moment of destruction, it was completely legal to sell the food. If it was legal to sell, it was legal to give away. And I'm not saying that they should let dumpster divers just come and take what they want. I'm saying that there are organisations (soup kitchens, etc) that you can have legal agreements with that leave Amazon free of liability, just as if they'd be free of liability if they sold the food. To not do this is evil. > Retail businesses operate on razor thin margins where a few missteps would kill them Selling food before it's best-before/expiry date is legal and is the core function of every retail business. They could sell this food for a $0.01 to a food kitchen and it would be no more a misstep or risk than if they sold it to any other customer. > it is pretty naive to think the professionals in that business do not know how to run their own business I said nothing of the sort. They know exactly how to run their own business. But they're evil people who are letting starving people suffer while they throw out perfectly good, FDA approved, non-expired, healthy food.
Retric 5y ago
That was ~60 years ago, it’s perfectly reasonable to use a 20 year time horizon for testing changes to the food supply etc. Progress isn’t just about whatever the new thing is it’s about finding something actually better.
- melony 5y ago
  says Lysenko.
quotemstr 5y ago
> And yet, without the agricultural revolution of the 1960s, we wouldn't have grocery stores today with well-stocked shelves. It's not that we wouldn't have well-stocked shelves: it's that we wouldn't be alive. We can feed as many people as we do because of the incredible advances we've made in agricultural sciences. Without those, there just wouldn't be enough calories to go around. Does the sum of all the joys of billions of people mean nothing to everyone who denounces modern agriculture? All this invective against technology is sophomoric, short-sighted, and fundamentally unserious, and if we followed the recommendations of people to whom science is a bad thing, just "playing god", then a huge number of us would simply cease to exist.
- carapace 5y ago
  Ecology is a science. > Does the sum of all the joys of billions of people mean nothing to everyone who denounces modern agriculture? The thing about that is that the story isn't over yet. Yes, billions of people owe their lives to the Haber–Bosch process (et. al., I'm obviously simplifying here) but if billions of people die due to ecological and economic collapse, is it really all worth it? As a concrete counter-example to modern mass agriculture there are ecological systems of food production that result in high yields while increasing fertility, biodiversity, and biomass (such as Permaculture, Syntropic and Regenerative agriculture, etc.) So we can have our both well-stocked grocery shelves and healthy ecosystems.
  - bmitc 5y ago
    Additionally, it seems the production of industrial ammonia is a major CO2 emitter. https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-ammonia-production-emits-CO2/97/i24 https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-a...
- bmitc 5y ago
  Do you have any references for these statements? I have never even heard that things were apparently so dire in the 60s. Does your sentiment that we apparently couldn’t feed ourselves take into account population growth? What if the population had simply not grown as it did? My current understanding is that the U.S. overproduces what it needs, exports the excess at dirt cheap prices, killing off developing countries’ farmer livelihoods. So in the U.S., there’s multiple birds killed with one stone.

tootie 5y ago

Honestly, we are really pretty good at playing god. Killing off a species of bee is sad and may have some unintended consequences but it hasn't put a dent in our ability to engineer the earth to suit our needs. The problem is motives and objectives. We have created the incentives to extract resources and not to protect organisms. So that's what we do.

09bjb 5y ago
> but it hasn't put a dent in our ability to engineer the earth to suit our needs We'll see about that when most soil is barren and most bees are gone. That is, very shortly.

0942v8653 5y ago

Not even limited trials with a long window of study (how long?) will prevent this. Science itself is a non-holistic way of looking at the world, blind to what is not measured. Concerning this example, it seems like a predictable effect of pesticides and global trade -- not unexpected, though perhaps not hoped for. Instead, the principle of caution must be applied when using technology. Pesticides that increase yield or decrease risk by only 10% may not be necessary at all. Any industrial action will disrupt Earth's equilibriums given the high level of consumption those in the developed world currently enjoy.

speedybird 5y ago
> Science itself is a non-holistic way of looking at the world, blind to what is not measured. This is unfortunately a broad class of error; qualitative metrics which are difficult to measure and quantify get brushed aside by people who want to make rational data-driven decisions. Robert McNamara became infamous for this; the 'data driven' way he tried to manage the Vietnam War focused on hard quantitative metrics, like bodycounts, and de-emphasized or ignored qualitative metrics like popular opinion in Vietnam and America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy In the software industry, those that would rely on instrumentation and telemetry to guide product development often repeat the same mistakes. Many times I've seen user feedback ignored, derided, and demeaned. "Users are dumb, they don't know what they want. Ask users what they want and they'll ask for a faster horse." These ostensibly rational data-driven designers are ironically irrational because they ignore the well established limitations of their data-driven approach.

quotemstr 5y ago

> We think with our weak technologies and chemistries that we can play God. We can play God, do play God, and will continue play God. People used to think of electricity as the rage of an angry God. Now you're raging against progress on a device that harnesses lightning at a quantum scale in ways unthinkable even 50 years ago. Do you have no appreciation whatsoever for how much good it does to expand humanity's capabilities? Can you see only the downsides? The people complaining about technology and progress should propose actual fixes for the problems that appear instead of braying from the sidelines about how nobody should ever do anything.

titzer 5y ago
We live in a truly remarkable universe and Science is our best method of repeatable, measurable progress. But Science is a method in service of our desires, and incentives drive our economic systems. Science has been put in service of extracting maximum profit and maximum growth. One small part of that is efficiency in production. That efficiency has given rise to the broad material wealth that we enjoy today. But Science has not been put in service of understanding what is good for humans psychologically, spiritually, or even biologically. To the extent that it has, we are overwhelmed and outmatched by powerful economic forces in service of the profit motive. A profit motive that has locked us into dreams of perpetual exponential growth of a fundamental anti-biological system of roadways, electricity, and food production that has us first harvesting and then paving the biosphere for profit. And then we get comments like yours, thankfully and rightly downvoted. Comments trying to stir up more shouting and polarization and finger pointing. In pursuit of that cathartic polarization, your comment is really just support of an absurd, extremist viewpoint that must have as a starting point a staggering ignorance about what humanity is currently smashing to pieces in its pursuit of material wealth, coupled with a willful ignorance to reflect on it. The cost we exact on our planet is enormous.
- quotemstr 5y ago
  > Science has been put in service of extracting maximum profit and maximum growth. One small part of that is efficiency in production. That efficiency has given rise to the broad material wealth that we enjoy today. But Science has not been put in service of understanding what is good for humans psychologically, spiritually, or even biologically What is profitable is what is good. That's the beautiful thing about markets and prices: they force people to be honest about their preferences. When someone pays money for something, that means that what he's getting in exchange is good for him. Who are you to argue otherwise? Why should your aesthetic ideals of humanity's future override the actual preferences of real people as expressed through their market behavior? This idea that we can distinguish what is right from what is profitable is moralistic arrogance. > anti-biological system of roadways, electricity, and food production When I say that a certain strain of environmentalist is anti-human, I'm talking about people who would write about roads and electricity as if they were grand mistakes and should be undone. That's absurd. People who think this way can never be allowed to have power. If they got it, they'd ruin billions of lives. > And then we get comments like yours, thankfully and rightly downvoted. If your ideas can be supported only by censoring those who disagree, your ideas are weak and deserve to fail. > The cost we exact on our planet is enormous. The planet is there for us. We have no obligation not to impose costs on "the planet" any more than we have an obligation not to inconvenience the air we breathe or the dirt we stand on. This idea that we need to trade off interests of "the planet" against those of people is absurd. Ecological preservation might be justified in some cases in the interest of people, but we are under no obligation whatsoever to negotiate with Gaia for human welfare.