It's true for any reasonable discount rate. That doesn't mean every species of plant and strain of bacteria is worth saving but you can't expect people to intuitively understand the impact of preserving pockets of biodiversity on medical research.

Why is assigning value to animal suffering a no-go?

When did the **** lineage cross over from being worthless to being the center of all value?

As humans we tend to value the lives of other humans more highly than we do other species. But we also tend to value the lives of people in our family much more highly than we do of those not in our family, and i don't think it's desirable to teach children to value the lives of non-family members at zero (when outside the purview of the law). It might be useful in some cases. It's just that my life, and i expect my childs life, will be good enough that the well being of other human beings is worthy of some sacrifice/restraint.

I don't expect that in a world where human suffering still exists that animal suffering be any more than an afterthought but the idea that there's some apriori reason why we can't or shouldn't give any consideration to it is downright 'tarded.


Believe it or not a lot of people don't think that increasing freedom as much as possible is or ought to be the primary objective of government. Most people aren't that liberal.

Regarding the discount rate: hm no. At 3-4% (which is probably on the low end) after 100 year the terminal value of future utility is basically irrelevant unless we are talking about human-exctinction/nuclear apocalypse level.

But anyway you other objection seems fine on paper, only it doesn't require at all country level environmental rules to be fixed.

You can do two major kind of things to avoid the risk of missing out on future research of some special animal or plant insight that could be a breakthrough for medicine and other fields.

You can collect genetic data and biological element in order to be able to clone species in the future, and you can preserve pockets of biomes that are particularly complex to replicate in future lab settings.

It's about cost, and you can do both.

And i am in favour of using public money for that endeavour, as the extreme long term view and the strong externalities components describe a situation where public intervention could be superior to markets.

Also, those solutions don't imply additional bureaucracy on normal people, nor a change in behaviour mandated by the state, which are the elements that generally should dissuade decent people that ask for government intervention.

But this is exactly why the radical left wouldn't be ok with that solution.

I dont anthropomorhiphise animals once. Suggesting animals feel pain/suffering is not looking at them as though they are human. The above is total strawman.

Its not being against animal rights, its your reasoning for being against animal rights, that it will be a slippery slope leftist authoritarianism. This reasoning leads you to a position where infinite animal suffering is a positive good if it alleviates even the slightest and most trivial human inconvenience. Bravo, probably one of the most douchebag intellectual positions to adopt.



Yes, lets play the entirely intellectually honest game of reducing the "left" to simply what happened in your country after a global conflict.

Lets ignore, equal gender and racial rights, sexual freedoms, etc, all things traditionally opposed by the traditional conservative right and normalised by successive victories by the "left."

Your reductive binary thinking is that of a adolescent.

On a tangent.

You simply fail time and again to think things through.

Do you think someone who is unconscious through a rape, who discovers they have been raped after the fact feels no pain? Pain takes many forms.

Seriously?

I guess there is no pain in rape if the victim remains utterly ignorant of the rape. Yes lets use that a bass for analysis.

lol luciom.

Obviously rape is not exclusively about pain, I know you like to reduce everything to a single inflection point, but pain is obviously a large component of rape.

OAK it's not about a slippery slope, it's already happening on a massive, destructive scale. Nazi-environmentalism is a direct threat to human welfare worldwide. It literally kills people, a lot of them. And destroys wealth , in the sense of real quality of life, around the world.

Having ceded moral ground to the radical left, accepting to give intrisic value to something else than human beings, resolved into:

1) Incredibly longer construction time for big projects; this alone costs the western world tens/hundreds of billions per year in lost welfare (both the gdp coming from the construction itself, and the subsequent utilization of the asset). Bull**** environmental assessments that have to include in their analyses stuff which isn't about human values.

2) Hunger around the world that could have been solved sooner, because of religious (= nazi-environmentalism) oppositions to GMO. That is delaying hunger relief projects in several countries, and it's all radical left responsibility. Millions of people died in the last 2 decades because of this.

3) Worse CO2 pollution that we could have had with the same energy consumption, because of opposition to nuclear and hydroelectric power around the world.

4) antivaxing is directly correlated to those hyper-naturalistic worldviews (don't try to deny that, you know that's true), and that kills people too

So it's not like the risk of damages is an hypotethical, if we go on with animal rights.

Right now, around the world, countries that made the horrendous mistake of incorporating radical leftist positions into their value-scale and so into their policies damaged their citizens in a serious ways.

But of course admitting that one of the core movements of the radical left is a criminal endeavour which destroys human lifes and human welfare is beyond what i can ask from an intellectually dishonest poster as you already have shown to be.

Which has nothing to do with the generic left, unless and until they make those issues their own.

The normal, decent, left built the Hoover Dam. in a little less than 5 years. Radical left environmentalism would ban it's costruction today, or make it so honerous as to be impractical.

The radical left is the enemy of all society, but first and foremost of the normal, decent left. Because the evil, anti-human ideas that are constantly generated by the radical left spread like diseases in the left.

And not only this mean that the normal, decent, left is in a constant state of risk of losing reason, but also that the many reasonable things that the left still is able to produce in the world of ideas don't go over the aisle.

Because the right shields itself from all left contagion, given the life threating mental diseases that propagate from the radical left.

Which unfortunately means that even reasonable ideas coming from the left don't get support on the right, and society suffers as a consequence.

The left should admit that the radical left is a constant and present danger for society, separate itself utterly and completing from it, in order for society to be able to function normally.

Instead, what are they doing right now in america? they move further toward them. And this seems to be something that many people in this forum agree with.

Well, hell, no i don't.

If you go mirror climbing , you need some skills. Which you lack. So stop this, you made a demented comparison bringing rape out of the blue in topic which has nothing to do with rape, at all, in any way.

Let it go and focus on the even more serious mistakes you keep doing, with your radical leftism.

Also on some accounts the radical environmental left is what made trump win (i know this is controversial, but it's possible it's true).

Jill Stein voters are all radical leftists and they preferred to have a white supremacist president that risking having their religious nazi-environmental positions being watered down by the reasonable left.

That's how evil, how morally corrupted, they are.

LMAO, on no accounts did liberals make Trump win. You've just stepped on your dick so hard it shows you aren't to be bothered with.

Who said "liberals". I said radical environmental left, jill stein voters.

The chances that Luciom is actually knowledgeable about the worldwide impact of environment regulations on construction times, construction costs, and asset utilization are about 1 in 1,000,000,000.

You could give us your take on the matter, saying wether you think enviro regs increased construction times & costs for big project, if so roughly how much, and why.

Remember that i am talking about that portion of the rules that inserts non-human value into cost-benefit analysis, or in black/white box that have to be checked in order to progress (arbitrary thresolds of impact on biodiversity that can't be surpasse, blanket bans because of some specie preservation and so on).

Rules that try to strike a balance to fix externalities of various kind from a human-value perspective, i can stand by them and in case it's a matter of going more a la Sunstein in the analysis, but i can agree on the ratio of those rules, in general.

I'm not going to offer a strident opinion on this issue because I am not knowledgeable about this issue. That's my point. I don't think you are knowledgeable about this issue either. Few people are.

FWIW, Luciom, you are hardly unique in having strong opinions about issues that you don't understand. The same is true of almost everyone who has a super strong opinion about (i) the effect of Affordable Care Act on health care costs; (ii) what caused the housing crisis in 2007-2008; (iii) whether there should have been financial support for banks in 2008; or (iv) numerous other highly complex, multi-variable questions.

Lucian going full pro-animal cruelty is I think a first for the forum.

The present value of something 100 y remote at those discount rates should be still about 3-4 cents on the dollar. Some breakthroughs can be valued at many thousands if not millions of times the cost... the bigger factor is the probability it resulting in those advances.

You can and they do. And it’s more practical for some cases than others. Probably a lot more costly to itemize every element within the amazon than the value of the wood being chopped.


Wat?
Of course it mandates changes in behaviour. Of course it requires beaurocracy.

You’re giving examples where you think the judgment of policy makers were off the mark - where they overvalued non human constructs of value at the expense of human suffering. That’s not an argument for why there should be no value placed on it at all.

If slightly altering slaughtering standards resulted in a 1c/kg increase in the price of beef and significantly reduced extreme, prolonged pain regularly endured by cattle you'd consider it gravely immoral since you put no value on the welfare of animals. I would argue there should be some consideration given, i'm not sure what the price : suffering ratio should be.

Look at China for what an industrializing country without environmental regulations looks like; unhealthy air in the cities, displacing thousands to build a dam, a black market for Western baby formula because home grown formula is too dangerous.

The only check to capital is regulations, without government oversight capital will always maximize profits at the expense of everything else, including public health and the environment.

So if you aren't in favour of a law that put people into jail if they burn books, you are pro-book burning?

Trolly, you are like 100x better than this.

for many issues, qualitative understanding is several order of magnitude easier than quantitative understanding.

It's literally like the difference between estimating that not folding AK pre hu is +ev first in on the button, and estimating very precisely how much ev you'll gain playing it, and how best to play it on every runout given reads, stack depth and so on.

Uh? you don't get to measure the return on the cost of preserving the single item that then comes out being extraordinarily useful. You have to add up all preservation costs, and then tell me with a straight face that the expeced return for them is 20x real utiliy in 1 century. In aggregate.

What's stopping a country like the USA to give aid money to poor countries and in exchange gain absolute sovereign control of some pockets of wild areas, for preservation?
You think poor countries woudn't sell land to the US government?

Which changes in behaviour for the normal country resident? 0.01% of the land would be a reservation. Big deal!

It doesn't require additional beaurocracy. Remember, i am not an ACist or anything close to that. Some regulations are ok with me. So we would already have some entity enforcing those regulations (EPA, or similar). Give to them the power to send biologists on the public purse to collect genetic data, and money to buy land for preservation.

But then, that's it. All the rest of the land of the country is then only required to be developed according to human value, with no regard whatsoever to biodiversity or species preservation, or landscape and so on (unless a human value number can be attached to it and it's greater than the value generated by the development).

So you, in full honesty and with a straight face, want to tell me that china did something that western countries didn't do when it was their turn to develop?

Or you want to tell me that the median chinese would have been better off with more environmental control so slower growth?

Or you live in utopia-fantasy land where china could have got the same life quality improvements for its median resident while preserving the environment much more? like, no1 else ever did in the history of humanity at that stage of development?

This has nothing to do with privte capital btw, in china big development happened through public companies. The people displaced in order to build the damn, were displaced by the government. So what the hell are you talking about?

That's why i said the operating factor is the probability of what you're preserving materializing into something of significant value.

The progress is rare, but the value is enormous when it does materialize.

Even if you insist on being hard headed and want to value peoples preferences in terms of their ability to pay and argue that poor peoples lives are worth no more than the $20 in their pocket (or whatever credit they would qualify for), it takes only a small number of wealthy people whose health or longevity depends on that research to send the value of that research to the moon.

What's stopping the US from doing that is that the benefits of them doing it is accrued globally and over all future generations, and the costs would be incurred entirely by american citizens in the current generation. Brazil has a similar dilemma.

This applies to all sorts of problems in the world and without a centralized authority to govern there'll always be free loader effects, which leads to an under-servicing of certain types of investments.

They did the same thing that the western industrialized countries did, and in both cases they were likely over producing/consuming because they weren't obliged to internalize the costs inflicted on third parties. By how much is hard to say. But in as much as the pollution commits a harm on others both within or outside of it's borders, there'll always on the margin be excess consumption and projects that may have been unprofitable if obliged to pay those costs become profitable if not.

It's hard to look at them with any special contempt though. The world is filled by callous self interested actors almost without exception, and the ones who've convinced themselves that they're righteous are often the worst offenders.

This is why global governance is important.