[danparsonson]

> This is like saying nobody should ever take any medicine ever, even after years of study and analysis

Surely no-one would argue against the benefits of antibiotics, and yet after decades of successful use we're only now discovering that in using them, we're breeding resistant bacteria that we have no way to deal with. We're clever monkeys but we should remember that however hard we think, we can always miss something important, especially when we're talking about large complex biological systems.

If we can develop effective vaccines then I personally don't see the need to start deliberately exterminating species, even the truly loathesome ones.

[wat10000]

Antibiotic resistance was foreseen pretty much from the start. And this is hardly a cautionary tale. Antibiotic resistance just makes antibiotics less effective, and you’re still better off than you were without antibiotics.

A better example would be something like tetraethyl lead, which poisoned (indeed continues to poison) huge numbers of people for relatively minor gain. Even then, the problems were known, the profit motive just won out over the don’t-poison-everyone motive.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Surely no-one would argue against the benefits of antibiotics, and yet after decades of successful use we're only now discovering that in using them, we're breeding resistant bacteria that we have no way to deal with

People have been constantly arguing against all kinds of medicine, including antibiotics. And we have solutions to resistant bacteria. It's a social problem of developing expensive new antibiotics while restricting their market to the last line of defence. And finally, the analogy breaks down: we did develop and deploy antibiotics, and have been able to see the consequences and adapt as a result.

We're mindlessly eradicting species all the time. There might be a trolley problem in intentionally nuking one. But that's, again, socio-philosophical. If the first ecosystem we eradicate in collapses, against the predictions of practically every expert in the field, we can stop. In the meantime, we avoid a useless debate that costs millions their lives.

> If we can develop effective vaccines then I personally don't see the need to start deliberately exterminating species, even the truly loathesome ones

Again, a social problem. It's easier to get rid of the diseasse by taking out mosquitoes than it is to continuously convince populations to get vaccinated into perpetuity. (To say nothing of vaccines' adverse effects.)

[throwaway2037]

    > To say nothing of vaccines' adverse effects.

I don't follow this part. Can you provide some examples?

[JumpCrisscross]

> Can you provide some examples

Every vaccine has some fraction of the population is affects adversely. We’re super strict about that hazard. But it exists. Eradicating a mosquito isn’t risk free, but it’s (a) one and done and (b) strikes me as less risky.

[throwaway2037]

That is true of all medicines. So what is really being said here? Is there a hint of anti-vax in that comment? I cannot tell.

[danparsonson]

> ... the analogy breaks down: we did develop and deploy antibiotics, and have been able to see the consequences and adapt as a result.

Not sure what you mean here; I was replying to this:

> Certainly we must be missing some factor from this analysis

> ---

> This is like saying nobody should ever take any medicine ever, even after years of study and analysis, because there might be some unknown harm that we haven't yet identified from it because we aren't looking in the right places.

...my point being that we are now facing previously unknown harms despite the best research available at the time (maybe antibiotic resistance itself was foreseen, but did anybody warn about hospital run-off and agricultural usage creating reservoirs of resistance-breeding via competition and horizontal gene transfer inside sewage systems? This is the sort of unforeseen consequence I'm talking about).

> We're mindlessly eradicting species all the time. There might be a trolley problem in intentionally nuking one. But that's, again, socio-philosophical. If the first ecosystem we eradicate in collapses, against the predictions of practically every expert in the field, we can stop. In the meantime, we avoid a useless debate that costs millions their lives.

This is exactly the kind of hubris I'm arguing against.

The fact that we're doing it all the time anyway is not an argument to do more of it. It's a compelling reason to do less.

Ecosystems don't generally exist in total isolation from each other, and don't just collapse when we poke them. Far more likely is that we will cause a problem that takes years or more to manifest, by which time it's out of our control and much more difficult or impossible to fix.

The debate is not useless when we're meddling with things that we don't fully understand, with unknown consequences for the environment that we live in. This is the trolley problem - do we save people from malaria now at the cost of potentially worse problems in the future? Since we don't know for sure what effect our intervention will have on a grander scale, what can't know what if any damage we're doing further down the line. I think it's OK to consider that carefully; in the meantime, vaccines are still our best option, and social problems are generally easier to quantify and address; we're pretty good at human psychology these days.