> I wasn't even concerned about ecological impact.
I spat out a post in ten minutes that looked further out than you did. I wasn't even trying.
The people that actually do this stuff are trained, credentialed biologists and ecologists that have taken courses on this and spend literal decades reading studies about proposals and going down checklists of things that have caused problems in the past. It is literally their job to make sure nobody can say "You didn't consider X" during review, on the news, or in court.
Back in tenth grade I took an honors biology course. The year's final project was to write an environmental impact statement for, if I recall correctly, chopping down twenty or thirty trees in a nearby park. In retrospect, we worked off what I suspect was a massively stripped-down version of a tiny fraction of the real rules.
It took five of us a month and we wrote a hundred pages single-spaced.
> So do most programmers...
I certainly won't argue that the field of software engineering doesn't need more rigor - there are reasons that I prefer writing cleaner code than my coworkers often do. But this proposal isn't operating in the same regime I usually do.
I mangle data at scale for a fuzzy rules-engine type thing. I bet you do something with comparable correctness requirements. There are times I've looked at a bug, looked at the logs, figured out the underlying conditions, estimated the future occurrence, concluded that I spent more money just looking at the logs than it would cost to remediate the data by hand for the next ten years, and estimated that it'd take me three times as long to actually fix it. I do know what happens when my solutions aren't good enough, and I bet you do too.
Aerospace and defense programmers operate in a regime far more like what we see with these environmental proposals. And guess what? They know what happens when their code isn't good enough... and they have huge checklists that they go down for every single change and have their code audited regularly and tested obscenely thoroughly and spend weeks tracking down tiny bugs, stamping them out, and adding them to the checklist.
(Before you bring up the recent boeing failures: Take a look at the politics and incentives. Where did the economic and political incentives lie there? Where do you think the economic and political incentives lie for a proposal like this? Especially given how much environmental fearmongering we see as a result of movies like Jurassic Park? Do you think that anyone would dare approve a project like this with anything less than every single i dotted and every single t crossed?)
> but because it's new we're not addressing the same issue.
Development of resistance is such a well-known failure mode for pest-control tools that wikipedia's page on DDT has a whole second-level paragraph titled "Mosquito resistance".
Why do you think that evolution and resistance are novel failure modes, and why do you think they'd have been missed in the analysis?
Very much so. You were presenting how there would be no danger to the ecosystem if these three sub-species were successfully destroyed. I never got as far because I wondered about the similarities of population regrowth after destruction with insecticide and destruction with modified organisms.
> Before you bring up the recent boeing failures
I don't need to. Building nuclear facilities is (usually) a very rigorous field with the highest quality of engineering, but sometimes factors of design considerations interact in ways that create new conditions that were impossible to predict. And since you mentioned aeroplanes: if you look at NTSB reports, you often find the cause of crashes is a long chain of trivial events, every single one of them meticulously checklisted and tested with fallback modes to avert disaster. It's not the components, but the intractability of the web of interaction.
> Why do you think that evolution and resistance are novel failure modes
Because evolution and resistance are novel failure modes in the context of genetically designed natural enemies. Previous statistical models might not hold even though the situations modeled appears exactly similar.
> why do you think they'd have been missed in the analysis?
Genetic modification is a statistical process, much like an AI network where something goes in and the output is measured for fitness and fed back. Random artifacts are to be expected and accounted for, but cannot be known to exist before the fact. As such their model might be complete, but it might not be sound.
As you implied, rigor is important, and faced with potentially irreversible consequences, skepticism is not an unnatural or irrational response.
I spat out a post in ten minutes that looked further out than you did. I wasn't even trying.
The people that actually do this stuff are trained, credentialed biologists and ecologists that have taken courses on this and spend literal decades reading studies about proposals and going down checklists of things that have caused problems in the past. It is literally their job to make sure nobody can say "You didn't consider X" during review, on the news, or in court.
Back in tenth grade I took an honors biology course. The year's final project was to write an environmental impact statement for, if I recall correctly, chopping down twenty or thirty trees in a nearby park. In retrospect, we worked off what I suspect was a massively stripped-down version of a tiny fraction of the real rules.
It took five of us a month and we wrote a hundred pages single-spaced.
> So do most programmers...
I certainly won't argue that the field of software engineering doesn't need more rigor - there are reasons that I prefer writing cleaner code than my coworkers often do. But this proposal isn't operating in the same regime I usually do.
I mangle data at scale for a fuzzy rules-engine type thing. I bet you do something with comparable correctness requirements. There are times I've looked at a bug, looked at the logs, figured out the underlying conditions, estimated the future occurrence, concluded that I spent more money just looking at the logs than it would cost to remediate the data by hand for the next ten years, and estimated that it'd take me three times as long to actually fix it. I do know what happens when my solutions aren't good enough, and I bet you do too.
Aerospace and defense programmers operate in a regime far more like what we see with these environmental proposals. And guess what? They know what happens when their code isn't good enough... and they have huge checklists that they go down for every single change and have their code audited regularly and tested obscenely thoroughly and spend weeks tracking down tiny bugs, stamping them out, and adding them to the checklist.
(Before you bring up the recent boeing failures: Take a look at the politics and incentives. Where did the economic and political incentives lie there? Where do you think the economic and political incentives lie for a proposal like this? Especially given how much environmental fearmongering we see as a result of movies like Jurassic Park? Do you think that anyone would dare approve a project like this with anything less than every single i dotted and every single t crossed?)
> but because it's new we're not addressing the same issue.
Development of resistance is such a well-known failure mode for pest-control tools that wikipedia's page on DDT has a whole second-level paragraph titled "Mosquito resistance".
Why do you think that evolution and resistance are novel failure modes, and why do you think they'd have been missed in the analysis?