750M genetically modified mosquitoes to be released in Florida
An interesting aspect to this debate is: what kind of actions do we sort of instinctively judge to have very large tail risk, and should we trust those judgements? Of course, the argument here is about the precautionary principle. But the precautionary principle sort of assumes that we can correctly judge which actions have potentially disastrous (non-ergodic, to use Taleb&#x27;s vocab) consequences. That in itself is an inexact science. Maybe these mosquitos are about to naturally cultivate some horrifying virus, and it&#x27;s actually not genetically modifying them that would be catastrophic.<p>Taleb&#x27;s ilk tend to respond with a kind of Chesterton&#x27;s fence conservatism: things we haven&#x27;t yet done, haven&#x27;t wiped us out, so lets not do too much new stuff. But that&#x27;s an anthropic argument, with weird Bayesian properties.