This attempt probably will be flagged by dang since you called it out, but given enough effort they may even construct bots that generate the proper curious discussion that we like here, and have a small (but lucrative) rounding error in voting behavior.
but you're right, if the bots get better, it will get harder. i actually wanted to respond to one of the comments to talk about the butterfly effect etc., but thought the comment seemed very artificial. then i saw the other comment which was almost an exact carbon-copy, just a bit shorter, by a different, new account.
so, i was almost baited by a bot to actually respond and waste my time.
None of you know me. I might be a bot. But do I not generate curiosity? Do I not get downvoted on occasion? As a language model I—-
I think we have to look at these as an early iteration. These bots are only going to get better and better.
reddit despite of the advancing enshittification is still a big platform and a daily routine for many so it's not surprising that its being used by agents of various countries or communities to deploy their propaganda.
There's been a wave of AI(?) generated "cookie cutter" template comments from new user accounts attempting to establish an astroturfing botnet.
Once you 'see' the pattern it's hard to unsee it .. and they're now being rapidly flagged to death.
Looking at the two examples, they primarily stand out because there are two almost-identical ones, not because they're so obviously bot-generated that I'd go out of my way to flag'm. So I'd say they're doing a pretty good job already.
And quickly you start to question your sanity. Like... is this post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41076632) bot-written? it's written a bit oddly, could it be a bot? Who's to know?
The famous "firehose of misinformation" is hitting new high scores in the game of modern civilization.
I see it in real life too.
Nature is very efficient. If there opportunity, it seems like some animals might evolve to fill that role.
But to answer your question: wild dogs. But in India they spread rabies and other diseases, attack and kill people. And their excrements are highly toxic, and kill plants (unlike vultures).
Nature is not always efficient.
I think the other issue here is that those wild dogs are highly protected by law, even when they do spread rabies and attack and kill people.
that all depends on what you're optimizing for
This is a meme and it is unfounded. In most cases, nature is good enough.
utilizing energy gradients? maybe, but there's plenty of that on Mars yet it's barren. so probably certain ecosystems can be more or less efficient at this, right?
As someone who grew up watching "Life on Earth," I could not relate to their question at all. It was like if someone asked me, "Why should I care about oxygen?"
And of course, I had the shame that if I can't explain something simply, then I don't really understand it.
I still don't have a great answer that I can offer. But wow, this seems like another footnote I should add to my answer.
That man was unable to walk on the next morning by a 'mysterious' irreversible nerve damage, and is still in a wheelchair since that day. Bad things happen, sadly. But happen more often to those that don't care about biodiversity
Maybe people should start to care.
Maybe if something kills animals is in our best interest to understand that we don't want this stuff around. We are animals too.
We get a lot of our medicines and medical treatments from plants and animals, historically and to this day. If not for those creatures, these avenues of progress may well be inaccessible dead ends.
Life is a unique information form given rise through evolution. Elements are plentiful in the universe, but as far as we know, the information in the DNA of a species exists nowhere else. Thus, every species unique in the universe - we don't even know what we don't know about life yet, but we do know that every species extinct is an irreplaceable loss to the frontiers of knowledge we mostly haven't even managed to explore yet.
Some reasons offhand.
We're currently producing incredible amounts of food through monocultures, which is kinda the opposite of biodiversity. So the relationship with starvation is objectively inverted: we sacrificed it to boost yields!
Resilience is another thing that's very hard to reason about, because why would resilience matter to you if your race dies out? Sure, some animals and insects would have a higher chance of survival under different settings, but why does that matter to you, a human?
The medicine is a valid point, but I don't think random people on the Internet would prioritize that higher then cheap food, which we just established is enabled by sacrificing biodiversity.
While I'd agree that biodiversity is probably important, finding reasons for why - which actually matter to the average Joe - isnt quiet as easy
But our efforts to kill the pests can often harm the predators. The poisons we use might kill the predators too. The cycles of taking the pest population really low and then it jumping back up might leave the predators without enough food.
If you spray your yard for insects, the first things that will rebound in population are mosquitoes and flies because they eat us and our trash. Spiders and dragonflies will also be killed, but they'll rebound slower because their prey has to rebound first. Then what if you spray again before they fully rebound?
Let me guess for a moment that you care very deeply that humanity not go extinct.
Can you explain why, in truly objective terms?
The stupid question.
No matter how much time you spend answering it, they will ask exactly the same question a month later. Is a trap for grabbing time. The goal is that --they-- will be served with by --your-- attention, so is an ego boost move.
The best move here is oblique: "You are part of it, but is perfectly Ok if you aren't still ready to find the answer by yourself and benefit of that knowledge. Your live, your choice".
Reading this sentence gave me the unsettling feeling of cattle carcasses tossed into the trash, along with a feeling of, "surely that doesn't happen in the US?"
It turns out that landfilling a carcass seems to be a legitimate option (item 3 at [0]), and isn't something I'd ever thought about before.
0: https://efotg.sc.egov.usda.gov/references/public/UT/Cow_Mort...
[1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/corpse-demon
edit: I saved this comment to reply back and by the time I did others had posted the same thing
I think this is the real problem. Modern sanitation doesn’t depend on vultures. Having carcass dumps near population centers is going to cause problems even with vultures.
Isn't this a giant leap of faith to claim that the increase in the number of deaths must be caused by loss of vultures? Correlation is not causation! How did they rule out other confounding factors? How are they so sure that this increase is definitely due to loss of vultures? Some more details on the research methodology and these technical details would be nice!
> By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had plummeted to near zero (...) Since the 2006 ban on veterinary use of diclofenac, the decline has slowed in some areas, but at least three species have suffered long-term losses of 91-98% (...)
Wikipedia claims that before this, a vulture species "was thought to be the most abundant large bird of prey in the world"[1].
To be fair, the cause was conclusively identified as diclofenac only as late as 2004-2005. Even in papers published as late as 2003, various other, more likely culprits were being investigated, including pesticides, pathogens, or food scarcity. India moved to ban veterinary use of diclofenac by early 2005, slowed down by pushback from the Ministry of Agriculture for lack of an effective alternative vulture safe drug, which were only really demonstrated in studies in early 2006. Later that year diclofenac was banned.
