All true, but who is to say that the impacts of human-accelerated stochastic gradient descent are necessarily evil?

Isn’t this just an argument of nihilism? If it doesn’t matter because native/weed is an artificial distinction, or because it is by definition insignificant on a geologic timescale, then why get upset at people trying to change or reverse “the gradient” in any way?

I’m not upset at anyone, though people seem upset at me for pointing out the futility. I suppose the resources could be better spent doing something else, though I couldn’t tell you what that’d be.

All I’ll say is that while I am not a biologist or an ecologist, I do know several who work on conservation projects and efforts to counteract invasive species. This story shares so many similarities with other cases of an introduced species radically changing the regions ecology and that in and of itself is incredibly alarming to them.

Yes, at the end of the day the Earth doesn’t care and life will go on. But trying to maintain some semblance of a minimally invaded ecosystem is valuable to these folks and I greatly respect their efforts.

How to better spend resources than commenting multiple times per hour in defense of the idea that nobody here can prove that an effort to cull an invasive weed will have an impact on the ecosystem in a million years?

You could go lie down and listen to music or something (though I warn you, I can't prove that it will have any effect on a geological timescale).

Yes, but so what? We speed up evolution and force more adaptation. It's not good or bad. It just is.

Well it very likely could be bad for us which I care about for a while.

And it’s actually anti-Darwinian to even refer to “speeding up evolution.” There is no destination here. Things do not necessarily get better, more interesting, more beautiful, and so on. They just change, and they are already changing in ways that don’t seem desirable.

Of course “desirability” itself is subjective as well, in theory. In practice I suspect almost every human would prefer a world that is more biodiverse over one that is less biodiverse, all things being equal. Still a human value, but of course those are all we have when we need to make decisions.

Please provide a reference for the claim that the introduction of this plant to the area will result in less biodiversity across geo-biological timescales.

Without that you’re just spitballing.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/10/29/560292442/ba....

The plants that the bats rely on in Arizona is already on the protected species list and, coincidentally, in the area discussed in TFA.

One species in one small study does not biodiversity across geo-biological timescales make.

> Please provide a reference for the claim that the introduction of this plant to the area will result in less biodiversity across geo-biological timescales.

I really try to refrain from making comments like this, but this has to be one of the most simplistic, self-deluded arguments I've seen listed on this site:

"Please provide proof of the impact of this plant on the earth 1 Million years from now. What nobody has shown that? Aha I must be right!"

If your rubric for decision making is that no action matters unless you can beforehand determine its impact 1 million years from now, then it's really not valuable for you to comment on anything or participate in any discussion at all.

That is a self-deluded argument, but it isn’t the one I made. It’s the one you saw in the one I made, which reflects more on you than me.

Whether it’s valuable for you to comment on anything or participate in any discussion at all is something I’ll do you the curtesy of leaving you to decide.

Maybe it's not the argument you intended to make, but it is the one you made.

No, you think I know I’m right. That’s you projecting your biases onto my argument. Don’t do that, it makes for uninteresting discussions.

Just to rewind, you started with the claim that the distinction between invasive and non-invasive is fully arbitrary and not useful, then further suggested the completely mythological idea that evolution has a “direction” that can be accelerated.

I know nothing about this particular weed and its effects, but I don’t need to in order to know your claims are incorrect.

If you want instead to make the claim “this particular species isn’t invasive and/or doesn’t yield undesirable effects on its environment” then go ahead and do that, but it’s a very different one.

Evolution is just a fancy way of saying stochastic gradient descent of dna in the biosphere. A SGD routine can clearly move “faster” or “slower”, as can be measured by values like “preserved mutations per century”. Whether the “direction” is the same is up for debate (it almost certainly isn’t), but to claim there’s no “speed” metric that can be associated with Evolution is just absurdist head-burying.

Gradient descent is a model of what's actually happening here in reality. Sure, it's useful in some ways and sure, you can label things in your model if it's useful for your thinking.

Frankly not sure what you get out of modeling it that way and labeling "preserved mutations per century" as "speeding up," but feel free to do so.

One issue with the map-territory violation here is that it's very easy to assume the gradient descent is optimizing for something we care about and find desirable. You are smuggling in the idea that later in the gradient descent is "better" than earlier in the gradient descent. There is nothing in reality that necessitates this. It is totally possible for human contributions to this process (model it as gradient descent if you want, model it as "speeding up" if you want) to optimize things that are in fact very very bad for everything that humans care about.