Hi Nick. I agree it is important that the questions are easy to answer. However, I would say there are simple ways of letting users express their uncertainty. For the question about how much animal welfare should factor into funding decisions, there could be an option saying something like “I am very uncertain about which of the 4 views above I should pick”, or users could be allowed to give weights to each of the 4 views (instead of giving a weight of 1 to a single view). Then these answers could be used to define distributions for the probability of sentience, and welfare range conditional on sentience. Wider distributions would tend to result in a higher expected value of perfect information.
I like the idea of a 5th option “I don’t know”, but adding weights adds too much complexity for a public question stream I think. For the moral parliament or something deeper like that makes more sense to me
Hi Nick. I agree it is important that the questions are easy to answer. However, I would say there are simple ways of letting users express their uncertainty. For the question about how much animal welfare should factor into funding decisions, there could be an option saying something like “I am very uncertain about which of the 4 views above I should pick”, or users could be allowed to give weights to each of the 4 views (instead of giving a weight of 1 to a single view). Then these answers could be used to define distributions for the probability of sentience, and welfare range conditional on sentience. Wider distributions would tend to result in a higher expected value of perfect information.
I like the idea of a 5th option “I don’t know”, but adding weights adds too much complexity for a public question stream I think. For the moral parliament or something deeper like that makes more sense to me