All of Clare Sophia Finn's Comments + Replies
I'm not nearly as smart or involved as many people in this community, but quickly after discovering EA (about 4 years ago) I got the impression that climate change and threats to biodiversity were underestimated, and was surprised at how little research and discussion there seems to be.
One point I would like to raise is that this community seems to assume that everyone starts (or should start) from the assumption that human life and our species's continued existence is valued above all else. It's very anthropocentric, which is another thing that may aliena
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I think EAs focus on the survival of the human species above that of nonhumans because nonhumans can't prevent astronomical waste the way a flourishing, advanced human (or posthuman) civilization can. (That, or they don’t think nonhumans lower than chimpanzees are sentient, though I think that is a minority view.) I agree that biodiversity is good, but only in terms of its impact on the welfare of humans and animals. Although not many EAs seem to value biodiversity for its own sake in the way deep ecologists do, many EAs are concerned about wild animal welfare. There is a lot of suffering experienced by wild animals, either due to nature or from human activity, such as starvation, predation, disease, or infant mortality or r-selection. It’s very difficult to have interventions with an expected positive impact for much of this – for instance, if you eradicate a parasite or disease from a species, might that contribute to overpopulation, and consequently starvation and infant mortality instead? As such, WAW organizations like to focus on things like humane insecticides.
Links (floating formatting bar doesn’t show up on iPad sorry):
* https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Astronomical_waste
* http://www.animal-ethics.org/
* https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/persis-eskander-wild-animal-welfare/
I think if EA folks got involved in trying to change the climate change methodology it could go a long way towards minimizing the amount of wasted effort that other people are putting into the climate problem.