As always you'd have to determine whether some course of action would have disproportionate negative impact on other objectives, yep. Point there was to set out on what basis I'd decide and weigh those objectives - an orientation for what "progress" is.
> And what destructive or dangerous uses are now unlocked along that path?
I believe unanticipated novel applications skew positive on average, largely on account of most humans having mostly-positive intentions.
> What's the scope for those stats, are they global of specific to one country?
Global, e.g:
* https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy
* https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin...
> but I've seen plenty of examples of the extra years being pretty miserable. I'd be very interested to see a life expectancy comparison taking into account quality if life.
You could consider a factor such as Quality-Adjusted Life Expectancy (QALE), which is also on the rise.
> The point with defaulting to the latter is "don't break a god thing."
If "break" means "make overall better", why not?
> Considering only the potential upsides misses the potential downsides.
To be clear, my stance is that you should consider whether it's a net positive/negative:
* "Threshold for new advancements should not be whether we absolutely need it, but whether it does more good than harm"
* "if we're at 500 malaria cases and can reduce it further (without equal/greater degradations in other areas) then I don't see why we should ever be "happy to stop there""
My understanding is that you believe there should be some point at which we just stop even if there are still more beneficial changes to be made (in addition to not making net-negative changes, which we both agree on - though perhaps disagree about what specifically works out to be net-negative).
> We can't cure cancer in a vacuum, there are always costs,
There are costs, but it's very easily possible for the benefits to outweigh them, and more becomes feasible as humanity's knowledge/capabilities increase.
> and frankly the idea of curing a disease seems more utopian than realistic.
There are already a couple of diseases (including smallpox) that we've completely eradicated, and more (like polio) that we've made very good progress on. Cancer is tougher by its nature, but we can certainly at least reduce the number of cases and improve life for those who have it.
Well that depends heavily on how well we can predict the outcomes and account for downsides and externalized costs. That doesn't mean never change anything, I'd never argue for that, but I am generally more hesitant to than most to change things that are working well enough.
> My understanding is that you believe there should be some point at which we just stop even if there are still more beneficial changes to be made
I think your description here assumes too much clarity in what is possible or what will happen if you continue on. Sometimes the system is well understood and the potential gains are pretty clear, that isn't always the case though.
> There are already a couple of diseases (including smallpox) that we've completely eradicated, and more (like polio) that we've made very good progress on
I wish virology was that cut and dry. There are diseases that present nearly identically to smallpox and polio but were given different names based on hypothesized causes. Monkeypox and acute flaccid myelitis come to mind, respectively. If I remember right, polio is actually one where the clinical diagnosis steps rules it out simply because polio has been deemed irradiated, meaning anyone with polio-like symptoms must have something else because we got rid of polio.
There's a whole rabbit hole around how virology tests and isolates viruses, that's probably not helpful to ho down here. My point stands though, maybe we can eradicate a particular virus but we can't really eradicate a disease when that's largely just a named collection of symptoms.
Does halting not also come with lack of clarity? For instance, say we're choosing between two options:
1. Continue with disease/vaccine/antibiotic/etc. research
2. Halt said research
To me it seems as though both options come with uncertainties, which could resolve positively as well as negatively. That there is uncertainty or a lack of clarity does not bias me towards option 2. My choice would still be based on analysis of which option has the better expected outcome (which is, to my current knowledge, the former) - even if the best analysis available is a guesstimate with very low correlation (so long as it's a positive correlation).
> There are diseases that present nearly identically to smallpox and polio but were given different names based on hypothesized causes. Monkeypox and acute flaccid myelitis come to mind
Mpox is considerably milder - having killed hundreds of people compared to smallpox's hundreds of millions.
> If I remember right, polio is actually one where the clinical diagnosis steps rules it out simply because polio has been deemed irradiated
Polio isn't eradicated like smallpox is, though for most people it may as well be. Given ongoing eradication efforts my understanding is that there is fairly extensive testing compared to other diseases of its rarity (e.g: https://polioeradication.org/what-we-do/), so it's not just a case of "it's gone because we're ignoring it" if that's what's being implied.
That depends on how you choose to view it. Choosing to halt, or to be happy with where you are, is a certainty in that you have what you have but it is uncertain in that you don't know what you could have had if you kept going.
> Mpox is considerably milder - having killed hundreds of people compared to smallpox's hundreds of millions.
The severity is milder for sure, but the list of symptoms is nearly identical. Severity is a tricky one for most pathogens, its very common for severity to decrease over time as a novel pathogen becomes endemic.
> so it's not just a case of "it's gone because we're ignoring it" if that's what's being implied
My implication was "we won't diagnose it because we know it was eradicated," but that may come down to semantics. I'm happy to be wrong there too, I can't find the source I remember seeing for clinical diagnosis so maybe I'm thinking of a different condition.
If you halt disease research, there's a greater chance of a pandemic - or losing the battle to drug-resistant diseases. If you halt meteor deflection programs, there's a greater chance of a significant portion of life being wiped out by a meteor. That doesn't seem like certainty in any sense to me.
> The severity is milder for sure, but the list of symptoms is nearly identical.
You could say that we haven't eliminated all diseases with similar clinical presentations, but we have eliminated smallpox - the disease that was killing hundreds of millions.
> Severity is a tricky one for most pathogens, its very common for severity to decrease over time as a novel pathogen becomes endemic.
Mpox is not just a strain of smallpox that became less virulent over time - they diverged long before smallpox jumped to humans. Smallpox stayed deadly for thousands of years.
To clarify, there is greater chance of natural pandemic. The chance of man made pandemic goes down or disappears entirely though. I don't know how to properly weigh the pros and cons there, especially without know likely top secret details of what biological weapons research is ongoing.
> but we have eliminated smallpox
We have a definitional disagreement here. My understanding is that diseases are classified and diagnosed by symptom, not by severity of the symptoms. That would be especially tricky as everyone will have a different reaction to the pathogen or condition and the same underlying cause could present with more or less severity.
If you consider smallpox eliminated because disease with a similar severity is no longer present then we likely have to consider Covid eliminated as well, I don't think many would agree that it is though. People still test positive for CoV-2 and are diagnosed with Covid based on symptoms, it just isn't nearly as deadly or severe for most of the population now.
> Mpox is not just a strain of smallpox that became less virulent over time
Maybe I'm being pedantic here, apologies if that it. My understanding, though, is that monkeypox and smallpox are/were diagnosed by symptom and rarely or never diagnosed by isolating and identifying the virus in patients. Monkeypox and smallpox have very similar symptoms, meaning they could very well be considered the same disease even if they are believed to be caused by two different viruses.
I think it'd be excessively pessimistic (and very selectively so) to believe vaccine/etc. research would increase the overall chance of a pandemic. But, the idea I'm getting at is you seem to be mistakenly treating the choice of halting as not bringing uncertainty other than the relative "you don't know what you could have had" kind. Personally I'd say it's usually the inherently riskier choice than just continuing, on top of having worse expected result, but hopefully you can see that the action of halting does come with at least some uncertainty of its own.
> My understanding is that diseases are classified and diagnosed by symptom, not by severity of the symptoms. That would be especially tricky as everyone will have a different reaction
Symptoms also vary by person. Diagnosis can take into account a variety of factors (medical history, blood tests, etc.), including severity, to determine the most likely identification.
Diseases are classified in documents like ICD-11, with mpox defined as caused by the monkeypox virus ("A disease caused by an infection with monkeypox virus [...] Confirmation is by identification of monkeypox virus") and smallpox as caused by the variola virus ("A disease caused by an infection with variola virus [...] Confirmation is by identification of the variola virus in a skin sample of the rash").
> If you consider smallpox eliminated because disease with a similar severity is no longer present then we likely have to consider Covid eliminated as well
If there were extant strains of smallpox, even if less virulent, I would not consider it eradicated (but it could nonetheless be a significant success of medical advancements).
I'm not aware that we've eradicated any strains of SARS-CoV-2, let alone all of them, so I see no reason to consider COVID-19 eradicated.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be suggesting that even if we did eradicate SARS-CoV-2, we shouldn't consider COVID-19 eradicated because there would still inevitably be some patients presenting with sufficiently-similar-but-less-severe symptoms from, say, influenza.
> Monkeypox and smallpox have very similar symptoms, meaning they could very well be considered the same disease even if they are believed to be caused by two different viruses.
I'm not aware of anywhere that equates the two diseases - they're different enough even just in symptoms (including severity) and response that it would seem counterproductive to do so.
If "could very well be considered the same disease" means more in terms of "well it's all just arbitrary labels - in theory we could've chosen to classify diseases more broadly" then sure, but it doesn't really take away from the accomplishment of eradicating [the thing currently know as the smallpox disease] even if it were to no longer be known as a disease on its own.
That would still have to be weighed with the cost of such an ability. What would it take to actually do that? What would it take to get there? And what destructive or dangerous uses are now unlocked along that path? In a vacuum I'd absolutely want to have that ability, in reality its just a lot harder to say whether that goal is worth chasing.
> As compared to 1995, the average life expectancy has increased from to 64.9 to 73.5 and the portion of population living in extrmee poverty has decreased from 32.5% to 8.5%
What's the scope for those stats, are they global of specific to one country?
I'm always torn on life expectancy as a metric. Modern medicine has done a great job of extending lives but I've seen plenty of examples of the extra years being pretty miserable. I'd be very interested to see a life expectancy comparison taking into account quality if life.
> To me, "treadmill" implies lack of progress.
Totally fair, that may not be the best analogy. My point was just that its a goal with no end state.
> If we have the option to improve things (e.g: reduce cancer cases) and an option to not, I don't really understand the idea that we should default to the latter
The point with defaulting to the latter is "don't break a god thing." Considering only the potential upsides misses the potential downsides. We can't cure cancer in a vacuum, there are always costs, and frankly the idea of curing a disease seems more utopian than realistic. Disease is nothing more than a named collection of symptoms, you may be able to drastically reduce any one root cause but that doesn't eradicate the symptoms and most modern treatments are designed only to treat symptoms and ignore root cause.