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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32254 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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This line of thought actually scares me because it can be used as propaganda against making humans and animals healthier. This will be propaganda to destroy more nature in the guise of protecting nature. In particular

Even the time-honored idea of the “balance of nature” has by now been decisively refuted by modern ecological thinking

Is pants on head dim. The death and competition of wild animals serves to purify their health. When the birds are healthy they produce more offspring, only a few of which will be healthy and produce more; and the birds that eat the most nutritious seeds will distribute these widely. The principle is baked into all living things. When you take, eg, humans out of nature’s filter, you see autoimmune diseases increase, dysgenics increase, etc — this is what the urbanite neo-philosopher fears, that people realize their “people” are slowly being corrupted. I would call this fear a little culturally Jewish, and it does seem Nussbaum converted — because Jews have been divorced from agriculture for so long, were oppressed by Darwinian thinking, and (although I can’t find it) but Jewish groups have warned about eco-fascism in the past.

Yes, when the weakest animals die they suffer, but consider the happiness gained by:

  • Future generations, who are healthier

  • The healthier animals, who procreate and have more resources

  • The predator, whose enjoyment of predation is his entire life

  • All who enjoy more and healthier foliage and trees

You cannot “save” the weak animals in nature without a worse cost. If you feed them, that is feed taken from those who deserve it. If you allow them to procreate, those are weaker animals that are destined to die anyway. Anything that substantively saves them longterm makes the whole of the community unhealthier.

I stand by my ethical principle that I do not care if 100 trillions dolphins die, the only thing I care about is if the dolphin “community” is healthy and thriving in its niche, balanced with the needs of the ecosystem

I wouldn't worry about it. You have to be really far up your own ass to take "wild animal suffering" seriously and it's the kind of topic that vaporizes in a cloud of laughter anywhere with an atmosphere comprised of less than 50% farts. Seriously imagine trying to describe this "problem" to anyone with a job that involves being responsible for anything real.

Oh god, we're doomed, aren't we?

In case what I'm saying isn't clear - you are aware this was said about the entire currently dominant progressive memeplex?

Stated differently, what makes an ecosystem antifragile is that the individual members are fragile. It seems counterintuitive at first but once one thinks about it then it makes sense.

And it applies to the business world as well.

Reminds me of Nick Land’s Hellbaked. Particularly this section which describes the results of Nussbaum’s leftward impulse:

Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality — or, more realistically, any mere accidental and temporary reprieve from it — leads inexorably to the undoing of its work. Malthusian relaxation is the whole of mercy, and it is the greatest engine of destruction our universe is able to bring about. To the precise extent that we are spared, even for a moment, we degenerate — and this Iron Law applies to every dimension and scale of existence: phylogenetic and ontogenetic, individual, social, and institutional, genomic, cellular, organic, and cultural. There is no machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single iota of attained value outside the forges of Hell.

Isn't this just saying "available energy without competetive pressure allows you to have nice things"?

Yes, but also that we can not have nice things. Not for long.

Survive/Thrive is not a continuum axis, it's a mutual exclusion.

Eh, that sounds like an engineering problem. The whole goal of FAI research is to globally maximize for nice.

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