Pst, missing title

It's not for frequent visitors, it's for people visiting for the first time. This makes sense to me, as repeat visitors will know where to go inside the forum. 

But even the new and upvoted tab is filled with 1-2 week old posts for me. I'm not sure if that is intentional. Tbh it is probably the correct amount of content and ideal for most busy EAs. Unfortunately I started checking daily, (I do not think this is good) and discovered the "all posts" page. So I just click over to there immediately now. 

The forum is slow enough to be manageable for daily readers. I suppose eventually it might speed up and I can go back to the upvoted and filtered page. 

Fyi You posted the article+citations in the submission field twice. 

For what its worth, it looks to me like most of this isn't your own words. You said you only used AI for structure and punctuation, but Claude's writing style adds a lot of examples of "things you are not saying" and I see that throughout the article. There are many other AI-isms but I'm not going to ennumerate them all. 

There might be really good content here, but it feels like you aren't carefully trimming this article to respect readers' time.

I disagree that step one is convincing effective altruists. Other cause areas are more important, and it's not a priority to gather more support for nature/biodiversity. I think biodiversity/nature gets most of its value from flourishing future scenarios. Achieving those flourishing futures is far more important, and a prerequisite! Working on the greater priorities of x-risk and global health etc, should be the majority of EA's time and effort, but still it is good to spend some time thinking about the futures that we want aim toward and eventually live in.

I think it is a better use of resources to aim the existing environmentalists to better priorities within their own stated objectives. Hence focusing on that instead of "why does biodiversity matter in the first place" in order to convince new people.

That being said, I agree that most of the philosophy and evidence for the value of biodiversity/ecosystems is not rigorous and it is a gap that sorely needs addressing. So I did finally contribute some philosophizing as to why biodiversity might be valuable. (Part of a sequence trying to properly assess the value of nature, both instrumental and intrinsic.)

This is way outside my area of expertise but here are a few thoughts:

There are strategic oil reserves in many countries for this exact reason. 

There is some optional oil use, so those could reduce, while replacement fuel/power was built out.

Coal and retired coal plants exist as a stopgap. 

There are some known large untapped oil reserves, I think? I believe they are much lower quality oil and so not worth extracting right now. But if the world desperately needed oil, they would be a backup option.

Afaik, this is a known weakness and there are plans and research you can read about it from humanitarian organizations, military, national preparedness, and so on.

Oil shocks have happened, so those are good ways to examine what actually happens when oil supply suddenly drops. I don't think famines resulted, but there was serious damage? And we do have lots of other power generation online now.

I hold a lot of these same expectations. Very well written!

 I think it won't last forever, mostly because people won't be human-singleton-minds forever. But for a while, possibly a very long while, this is probably how things will play out.

I don't know what portion will be super persuaded into bad beliefs and what portion will be isolationist and what portion will be enlightened in our future. I'm okay with some limited extreme beliefs surviving. I hope it's similar or better than today... But it won't be, necessarily. 

Thanks for writing this.

(Lady of Mazes is a scifi book that describes how you might have to shift your beliefs/mind in order to communicate and move between communities and that this is a difficult thing to do.)

Hi, FelixG I really enjoyed this post!
I have a poor understanding of this topic. Most of all I wish I had a clear idea of what the biggest danger is from water mismanagement. I can't tell if it's pollution, aquifer drainage, mismatched timing, wrong location, or something else. 

I once tried to take a look at existential risks from lost ecosystem services and wrote this brief summary against it qualifying as an existential risk (I know you specifically are NOT claiming existential risk, but I think the commentary is still useful grounding): 

Environmental activists make it sound like we are running out of freshwater. But only 2% of watersheds use 75% of their freshwater. Data centers are not draining our water supply. To be clear, we are choosing to pump truly preposterous amounts of water out of aquifers for agriculture, and this is unsustainable and bad for the environment. But we could be far less wasteful, recycling and desalinating way more. Surface water is returned annually so we aren’t going to “run out.”

During my mini foray I was pretty shocked at how much water is being drained from aquifers. I wish I could spend some time thinking more deeply about the threats from water misuse. 

As a general rule, I have found resource depletion threats tends to sound ominous, but turn out to be avoidable upon closer inspection. Resource depletion is usually hundreds of years out. And there are usually moderately more expensive alternatives which we would switch to, once we started to experience scarcity. 

I would want to check on that for water bankruptcy: When would we run out. Where. Is this a new problem, or a fact of the environment. What viable solutions are there, if any. 

"...such system could collapse and lead to numerous cascading bad consequences. At least, to my understanding."

I would like to see some specific examples of a water-crisis-cascade, to get an idea of how it has manifested so far.^[1] Follow by some estimates of the maximum scale it could theoretically reach. 

I just did a research report on vultures as an ecosystem service and got some high numbers of irreversible human health damage. So its very vivid to me right now that environmental damage can be huge, and far cheaper to avoid than to try to reverse. I could definitely see aquifer drainage as being a case of eating the seed corn and heading for worsening disasters. But I could also see it as having simple solutions and being hundreds of years away from becoming an issue, in most places.
 

1. ^{^}

   (When I tried to do this for ecological collapse, I was shocked I couldn't find any real-world examples of cascading collapse. Which made me update that it's a much less likely source of unpredictable devastation.)

I'm reminded of this rather nice infographic:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pxEHC6uBzsXRdWqax/i-made-an-infographic-for-the-introduction-to-effective

Hi! From the title I thought you were offering advice. You might want to add something like "looking for/help requested" so people know to click and suggest ideas and recommend connections

Thank you! You are right of course that I didn't include long term resilience. I was just trying to start with the most basic first-approximation "baseline minimum" assuming perfect knowledge and handpicked extinctions. 

Resilience is difficult, because it is a noisy gradient, and ultimately a choice where to pin the "right amount" of stability. It co-depends on our fluctuating ability to cope with the 100-year extremes. I'm not accounting for stochastic events, tipping points, natural disasters, or 95% survival rates on 50-1000 year timelines. I'm also missing an unknown number of ecosystem services, and didn't include supporting ecosystem services(!).

Which is why the numbers I ran would realistically be higher. I'm not sure how much higher. 10%? 50%? 2x? 10x? Even at 10x though, its still around 10-20% of species.^[1] 

So, to answer your question, how much changes when we include long term resilience/insurance/response diversity?

From what I've seen of the biodiversity x ecosystem-service-benefits, it caps out surprisingly fast. I agree that different traits result in different performance under different shocks, and that it is important to system stability. But again, I'm guessing stability caps out surprisingly fast. 

Yeah. It looks like stability rises approximately linearly with log richness. You probably get most of the gains in the first handful of species. The gist is that if you halve the species, we keep 75% of the stability. 25% the species and we keep 50% of the stability.... Translating this to "required biodiversity for ecosystem services," we should never have one species providing an ecosystem service. Any service should have a minimum 3-5 providers. For the rest, I can't speculate what level of stability is needed. I vaguely feel losing most stability is probably acceptable, but this really demands calculating out the costs incurred and the acceptable rate of catastrophic failure. (intact ecosystems also have rates of catastrophic failure, so the increase in rate...)

Sorry to continue to be a nag, but managing ecosystems might be an easier way to increase insurance than species numbers. 

Maybe I'm overfixating on gloomy estimates to be "rational." I would love someone to show me some concrete numbers that challenge this picture.

From your first link: Within-species portfolios accounts for ~2× stability?! Huh, Des Roches et al. 2018, Raffard et al. 2019 compare intraspecific-variation effects against species-replacement effects on ecosystem functions, and within-species effects show similar magnitudes! This seems to indicate that stabilization comes from decorrelated units. Of any kind. Populations, age classes, genotypes, species, anything that delivers varying responses... Which should move some of our concern to the ongoing loss of species genetic diversity (and maybe habitat heterogeneity, shared susceptibility to natural disasters, disease, etc?)

I appreciate the pushback!

2a,b,c) Agree, people discount the long-term benefits and positive externalities of ecosystem services quite a lot!

2d) Totally, agree with this and I wasn't adequately considering it. Its usually costly and uncharted how to reverse the loss of ecosystems. Infrastructure is a sunk cost and requires a lot to remove, and we acclimate to how things currently operate, so we wouldn't just move back even when its strictly better. 

2f) Option value: I agree. But I think it can only account for maybe 4x the species we currently value?

3.) Ah, sorry, I don't expect to "harvest everything there is to know" about a species anytime soon. This is more about a hypothetical distant future to acknowledge that, technically, knowledge is finite and not identical to the species. This is not relevant for hundreds of years. After hundreds of years I expect we will be able to simulate/understand adaptations to climate before they happen. Like how we can semi-predict how the flu will have mutations each year, and are trying to accurately estimate the climate phenotypic plasticity of species today. We will eventually map out all the possible mutations, their likelihood, their impact on survival, and all that will remain to discover is which course history actually takes. But this is just about the far future, where we are able to easily create entire species from scratch, and things are very different. In between then and now, wild populations have lots to teach us about adaptation, behavior, climate, biochemistry, nature, ecosystems, umwelt, and imo more than we can name.

1. ^{^}

   I came into this expecting to show it would be around 30% of species, and ended up calculating 1%. :( I'm not confident about any of this. I'm trying to get my bearings. It's lower than I expected. It seems clearly less than 50% of all species. It seems clearly higher than 0.2% Probably around 1-10% That seems really low. I'm more comfortable assuming 20-30% Augh.