Comment by losvedir

8 years ago

Sigh, I knew before clicking that the comments would all be low effort "ho ho - but unintended consequences!" snark. Yes, everyone knows about that risk.

At least two points are important: they're not eliminating all mosquitoes, just aedes aegypti, which are the disease carrying ones, and there's a huge opportunity cost in not doing something here. There's always the risk of unintended consequences, but you really have to have extremely severe ones in order to offset the known cost of this species of mosquitoes.

I'm actually very interested in hearing concrete ideas of what the unintended consequences could be and their cost, from actual experts.

11 comments

losvedir

Reply
scabarott  8 years ago

>I'm actually very interested in hearing concrete ideas of what the unintended consequences could be and their cost, from actual experts.

Not all unintended consequences can be predicted let alone have a cost attached to them. In fact by definition unintended consequences are those we cannot forsee or prepare for in any meaningful way. Of course virtually any action has some unintended consequences but I think what the naysayers are saying in this case is that with something as complicated and untested as this, there is potential for massively negative unpredictable outcomes (maybe a new invasive species, maybe aedes aegypti perform some as yet unknown ecological function and their loss would be massively detrimental in ways we can't as yet predict etc), and there's some justification for that from human experience. This was the entire premise for movies like Jurassic park

  • corodra  8 years ago

    You mean you can't foresee the unforeseen? No!

    But you're right. The moral of the story to Jurassic Park pretty much was "Just because you can science against nature, doesn't mean you should."

    But to be fair to, ae. aegypti is technically invasive, to the entire USA. Ridding it TECHNICALLY is a good thing for the local ecosystems. However, I personally don't think the method they're going about it will be as effective as hoped plus it seems like a pandora's box of food chain chaos.

    That's kind of where global warming would actually help. Due to the life span and mating cycle, along with egg hardiness, if they have a good drought for about 8-10 months. And then they do extensive hormone pupacide and larvacide treatment. They can nearly eradicate the entire nearby population in one year's time. However, a. aegypti have like an average 800m migration distance within their lifespan (if I remember that right). Thus, they can then do perimeter containment of certain areas to ensure no new migrations into their area. But instead, let's play god and engineer bacteria to fuck with reproductive systems.

bun_at_work  8 years ago

> but I know that I'll be unlikely to get that from HN

This is super unfortunate, because it's why I came to HN in the first place. But unfortunately the site is becoming more twitter and less serious discussion.

  • ben_jones  8 years ago

    Just because people aren't discussing this the way you want them to doesn't make it Twitter.

    • dymk  8 years ago

      No, the constant spreading of FUD around the hivemind-identified “bad” companies, semi-intentional misunderstanding of how they operate, and general pessimistic vibe make it Twitter.

  • losvedir  8 years ago

    I ended up editing that out since it was unnecessary. I've been here for 10 years and HN often has commenters with amazing domain expertise in tech things, but outside of tech it's hit or miss.

bitL  8 years ago

"Sigh" just indicates you couldn't care less about a contradicting opinion. Why should anyone discuss anything with you/care about what you have to say when your default mode is to disregard critique?

  • stronglikedan  8 years ago

    > "Sigh" just indicates you couldn't care less about a contradicting opinion.

    Sign, that is not true at all. Especially when followed with "I'm actually very interested in hearing..."

    Furthermore, your comment doesn't contribute to the conversation at all, which is why it was downvoted.

pvaldes  8 years ago

Expecting free consultings in a very delicate and complex environmental theme wouldn't be realistic. If they want a specialist they could just try to hire her/him.

We had explained here (many times) what type of unintended consequences we could expect. Superficially of course (Don't expect a free 40 pages report about basic autoecology of mosquitoes here, this is not the place for that). It seems that a lot of people just do not want to hear about it. There are entire books written about this theme.