The trouble with conservation

A recent article (1) articulates how well intentioned conservation policies could have unintended effects. From inception, humans have been attempting to shape the environment, first to their own tactical benefits and then for undefined strategic goals. Humans generally deliver bad outcomes to a plethora of life designs surrounding them and themselves. They like control and satisfaction emerging from their efforts to destroy and then attempting to mend the greenhouse they are part of.

Conservation, the darling of millennials and those following them, could turn out be a bad thing. Those engaged in these sentiments also do not like "markets," and would like to set everything "right." What they may be missing is that there is a cost to playing with nature and humans do  not appear to be smart enough to predict the effects of singular actions on a highly non-linear and connected system.

Good intentions are necessary but not sufficient for better outcomes. More importantly, the idea of manipulating a complex non-linear system with linear policy choices is fraught with danger. The universe appears to be anchored on "markets," as illustrated by evolution. However, it is too crude and thought experiments in the direction of universal optimization may be apt. But ironically, it does not mean that such a state can be reached by incremental manipulation of the status-quo.

Stuck in a trough, humans appear to have bad instincts. Most of them want to climb out of the hole but the policy choices they impart are likely sub optimal and may pull them further down.

(1) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-one-protected-species-kills-another-what-are-conservationists-to-do1/?redirect=1

36,000 days and optimization within a catastrophic constraint

Humans have a very interesting mathematical problem. They have to optimize within a harsh time constraint. Although the endowment is not known, it is increasingly predictable. Even though the range is broad - from 0 to say, 36,000 days, the variance has been going down, thanks to modern medicine. But most humans sub optimize. Materialism, ignorance, hunger for power and a variety of other value destroying metrics have misguided nearly 100 billion samples from inception.

The time afforded to a human appears limited. Irrational thinking has led most astray, some believing "God," is going to save her and others trying to create "legacy," in the absence of such an entity. It is unclear what a random individual is trying to maximize. For half the contemporary population, it is all about maximizing the probability of higher utility in after life. For the rest, it is more complex. As the seconds wind down to the inescapable event horizon, most humans run for tactical metrics without any value.

What would human 2.0 feel like? For her, contribution to society will be supreme for anything else seems meaningless. As the event horizon is specified without any flexibility, it would be important to contribute before she crosses the inescapable boundary. It is counter-intuitive as it is not that a human has to contribute to the perpetuation of a species, that appears less interesting, but rather that her role in the larger context, has meaning. It is meaning for society we are after and that is likely too conceptual for many.

Human 2.0 - If we ever get there, it could be a fantastic world with a simpler objective function, something that maximizes happiness not wealth, something that maximizes knowledge not ego, something that maximizes society not the individual, something that maximizes ideas, not the mere description of them, and something that maximizes empathy not the portrayal of the same.