Alfredo Parra 🔸

• Alfredo Parra 🔸Jul 17, 2025, 11:48 AM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Cody Albert’s comment on: Quan­tify­ing the Global Bur­den of Ex­treme Pain from Cluster Headaches

  All testimonials we’ve heard about DMT are crazy. Some people report being able to abort 100% of their attacks with low doses and no apparent loss of effectiveness with continued use. Here’s a relevant interview: DMT for Cluster Headaches: Aborting and Preventing Extreme Pain with Tryptamines and Other Methods

  Dr. Emmanuelle Schindler at Yale (top expert in psychedelics for cluster headache) is planning to run a survey on DMT usage. (We’re helping her fundraise, so anyone reading this with $150k to spare, let me know. :))

• Alfredo Parra 🔸Jul 17, 2025, 7:06 AM

  5 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: David_R 🔸’s comment on: 80,000 Hours is pro­duc­ing AI in Con­text — a new YouTube chan­nel. Our first video, about the AI 2027 sce­nario, is up!

  >1.7 million views in 7 days! B-A-N-A-N-A-S!

• Alfredo Parra 🔸Jul 2, 2025, 6:28 AM

  21 points

  8 ∶ 2

  on: De­bate: De­pop­u­la­tion Matters

  Depopulation is Bad

  I remain unconviced by the arguments in the book (based on this post). My main disagreement is that it assumes that the main downside of a larger population is climate change (which I don’t think it is), and then goes on to focus exclusively on all the great things we could have with more people. Perhaps not surprisingly, I think this debate is not complete without bringing up the problem of extreme suffering:

  More Good is Better. It’s better if there is more good in the world, other things being equal, and worse if there is less. That includes good lives: It’s better if there are more good lives.

  The above begs the question. Sure, more good is better, but the book title is not “the case for happy people.” Doubling the population would mean:

  • 560 million people living with depression instead of 280 million.

  • 1.4 million people committing suicide every year instead of 700k.

  • Doubling the number of people being tortured in prison camps, living in totalitarian regimes, living in war zones, living with cluster headaches, etc.

  • Doubling the consumption of chicken, fish, etc.

  Maybe one could argue that growing the population would also help us fix all of the above faster, but I seriously doubt it (and it would seem to me more like an instance of suspicious convergence).

  The book authors seem to be basically saying “wouldn’t it be awesome to have more people like us? Healthy, wealthy, happy-go-lucky, living in a free democracy, and with such high IQ that we might invent a new vaccine?” (Sorry, this might be unfair, but that’s at least the vibe I get from this post.) But I think we absolutely need to think about those living in agony too. Until then, I’m unconvinced.

  Maybe less importantly (because it may be rather a matter of aesthetics), I’m also not moved much by the argument “aren’t you glad to have more books, magazines, high-speed streaming, etc., and wouldn’t it be great to have more of that?” There’s something hungry ghost-y about it that goes against my striving to be content with less. Like, yes, I admit I really like vaccines, but maybe our goal should be “let’s shift our societal priorities such that fewer people go on to become TV producers and instead become vaccine researchers.”

  Something similar applies to this:

  Imagine that half the people you know and love never existed.

  I think the thought experiment is trying to evoke a feeling of sadness at the thought of never having met half the people in your life, but to me it also implies that, right now, I should be sad that I don’t have twice the friends I have. I reject this implication.

  Anyway, I still appreciate the book summary and will be thinking about the topic more as a result. And I’m still open to changing my mind if there are other arguments related to the problem of extreme suffering.

• Alfredo Parra 🔸Jun 27, 2025, 8:45 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Vilfredo's Ghost’s comment on: Please re­con­sider your use of adjectives

  Thanks! I think we probably agree much more than your comment suggests. I wholeheartedly agree with this, for example:

  But better still would be “I would like more examples of what these budget numbers mean for our day to day operations” or “expert consensus is that people will pay more attention if you sound excited when you give a presentation”.

  Those are the kinds of indisputable facts that I think should be used instead of judgments (no one can dispute that you would like more examples for the budget).

  I think there’s a caricature version of NVC in a lot people’s minds where NVC is all about talking about feelings or something, in a way that feels insincere or naive. And perhaps justifiably so—I’ve seen people weaponize NVC to just mask their judgments behind a veil of seemingly nonviolent language, but their intentions are all too obvious, which often leads to even worse outcomes. So yeah, basically I’m fully on board with the idea of speaking/​writing in a way that will most clearly convey meaning.

• Alfredo Parra 🔸Jun 24, 2025, 3:56 PM

  3 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: The Need to Op­ti­mize EA Con­tent to Show Up in AI Chats

  Nice, thanks for sharing this! I’d been thinking about this topic for a while. It seems like something for the EA Forum team to invest some resources into (maybe they already are).

• Alfredo Parra 🔸Jun 22, 2025, 7:10 AM

  7 points

  4 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Please re­con­sider your use of adjectives

  Thanks! With “such as,” I meant “among others.” I agree that “makes me sad” wouldn’t do the job here, but I think the other examples I mentioned would, no? (“I disagree”, “I doubt”, etc., which aren’t really feelings but they’re still not judgments).

• Alfredo Parra 🔸Jun 6, 2025, 8:37 PM

  2 points

  1 ∶ 1

  in reply to: hbesceli’s comment on: Re­vamped effec­tivealtru­ism.org

  (Very much agree with the “Featured in” point!)

• Alfredo Parra 🔸Jun 3, 2025, 2:57 PM

  6 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: EAG Lon­don ’25 Co­or­di­na­tion Thread

  I’d love to talk to people broadly interested in ways to reduce the burden of extreme suffering in humans, which I think is weirdly neglected in EA. The vast majority of global health & wellbeing work is based on DALY/​QALY calculations (and, to a lesser extent, WELLBY), which I believe fail to capture the most severe forms of suffering. There’s so much low-hanging fruit in this space, starting with just cataloguing the largest sources of extreme human suffering globally.

  I’m eager to talk to potential collaborators, donors, and really anyone interested in the topic. :)

  Here’s my Swapcard.

• Alfredo Parra 🔸May 25, 2025, 2:55 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Wladimir J. Alonso’s comment on: “Most painful con­di­tion known to mankind”: A ret­ro­spec­tive of the first-ever in­ter­na­tional re­search sym­po­sium on cluster headache

  Thank you so much, Wladimir! I admire the work that you and your team at the Welfare Footprint Institute are doing, so this means a lot coming from you!

• Alfredo Parra 🔸May 20, 2025, 7:19 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Dee Tomic’s comment on: “Most painful con­di­tion known to mankind”: A ret­ro­spec­tive of the first-ever in­ter­na­tional re­search sym­po­sium on cluster headache

  Thank you so much, Dee! There might be a way for you to help—I’ll get in touch in the coming weeks! :)

• Alfredo Parra 🔸May 18, 2025, 4:22 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ande T.’s comment on: “Most painful con­di­tion known to mankind”: A ret­ro­spec­tive of the first-ever in­ter­na­tional re­search sym­po­sium on cluster headache

  Thanks so much for your comment and your willingness to support these efforts! I’d be happy to chat and brainstorm ways for you to contribute. Just get in touch anytime (e.g. DM me here on the Forum). 🙂

• Alfredo Parra 🔸May 7, 2025, 12:59 PM

  15 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Speedrun­ning on-de­mand bliss for im­proved pro­duc­tivity, wellbe­ing, and thinking

  In case it helps, I enhanced the audio of Rob Burbea’s jhana retreat, which you can find here. :)

• Alfredo Parra 🔸May 6, 2025, 4:57 PM

  5 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Derek Shiller’s comment on: It’s time to say good­bye to “func­tion­ally equiv­a­lent ar­tifi­cial neu­rons”

  Thanks for reading and for your comment, Derek!

  there doesn’t seem to be any obvious mechanism for general quantum level truths to exert the kinds of very targeted influences that would be necessary for them to explain our beliefs about consciousness

  I think it will turn out that the mechanism will not be obvious, mainly because quantum mechanics and fundamental physics more broadly are extraordinarily complex (and I expect that understanding consciousness will be just as difficult as understanding, say, quantum field theory). But, that being said, I do think there exist candidate quantum mechanisms that might explain the macro-level phenomenon of binding, such as entanglement.

  Another assumption behind my position (which I also outlined in Indirect realism illustrated (and why it matters so much for consciousness debates)) is that, since I believe consciousness/​qualia are real (and a thing, not a process), the only sense in which they can be really real is for their 3rd-person physical correlates to be found at the deepest level of reality/​physics. Any correlates that are not at the deepest level—however elaborate—are just useful fictions, and thus (IMO) no different than what e.g. computational functionalists claim.

  Hope that makes my views a bit clearer.

• Alfredo Parra 🔸May 6, 2025, 4:35 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Mitchell Porter’s comment on: It’s time to say good­bye to “func­tion­ally equiv­a­lent ar­tifi­cial neu­rons”

  Thanks so much for your thoughtful and detailed comment, Mitchell! It seems like we’re roughly on the same page regarding the various constraints that a successful theory of consciousness should meet, as well as the class of approaches that seem most promising. Let me just share some immediate reactions I had while reading your comment. :)

  The problem with entanglement is that it potentially gives you too much unity

  Potentially, yes (though my understanding of entanglement is limited). On the other hand, as Atai has pointed out, “most binding-appreciators strongly, strongly underestimate just how ‘insane’ it is that we can have any candidate solution to the binding problem *at all* [entanglement] in a universe that remotely resembles the universe described by classical physics.” (Here’s his full writeup, which I find very compelling.) This makes me think that maybe we will find that entanglement gives us just the right amount of unity (though the specific mechanism might turn out to be pretty elaborate). Do you have any resources on the point about “too much unity”? I’d love to learn more.

  First of all, the nature of the structures that hypothetically bridge fundamental physics and conscious states is still wide open, because the mathematics of fundamental physics is still wide open.

  Agree, and this is part of what motivates the argument outlined in the last paragraph of the section “Sufficiently detailed replicas/​simulations” above.

  For me, the core arguments against substrate-indifferent information-based theory of consciousness, revolve around vagueness.

  Same for me. The paper “Are algorithms always arbitrary?” makes this case nicely.

  But there are a number of challenges to this argument—aren’t states of mind vague too?

  Maybe, yeah, depending on how we define a state of mind. But as you pointed out, “there is a kind of ontological exactness that states of consciousness must possess,” which I also agree with—namely, that at least some moments of experience seem to exhibit some amount of fundamentally integrated information /​ binding. So if an ontology can’t accommodate that, it’s doomed. I believe that’s the case for information-based theories, since any unity is interpreted by us arbitrarily, i.e. it’s epiphenomenal.

  They only require that your simulation is a little more fine-grained than we used to believe necessary.

  I think “a little more” is doing a lot of work here. If consciousness is a thing/​substrate, then any emulation that abstracts away finer levels of granularity will, by definition, not be that substrate, and therefore not be conscious (unless maybe one commits to the claim that the deepest layer of reality is binary/​bits, as pointed out above).

  In any case, at least for quantum theories of mind to become widely convincing, there needs to be some evidence that quantum biology is playing a role in conscious cognition, evidence which I believe is still quite lacking. Hameroff’s microtubules are still by far the best candidate I have, for a biological locus of persistent coherent quantum states, but it seems difficult to get decisive evidence of coherence. The length of the debate about whether quantum coherence occurs in photosynthesis shows how difficult it can be.

  I confess I still don’t fully understand why we need to definitively prove that coherence has to be sustained. QM plays a causal role in the brain because it plays a causal role in everything, as I was hoping to convey with my xenon example. But I’ll keep thinking!

  I’ll add another candidate for quantum biology into the mix: the Posner molecule (also mentioned by Atai here).

  Thanks again! :)

• Alfredo Parra 🔸Apr 24, 2025, 1:02 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Health Sys­tems Strengthening

  Really cool report! Thank you and congrats on publishing it. :)

  I’d love to see an analogous report tackling preventable severe suffering (i.e., beyond preventable deaths). There’s a wonderful case report from Uganda’s efforts to provide universal palliative care (see this short documentary). A good starting point could be the Lancet Commission report “Alleviating the access abyss in palliative care and pain relief”.

• Alfredo Parra 🔸Apr 23, 2025, 1:21 PM

  5 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: In­sects Are Not Moder­ately Important

  In addition if they are sentient, then I would estimate their experience of pain might be between 1x and 1,000x less important than that of an individual human.

  This is the reason why I agree that there’s a non-negligible chance that insect suffering is “only” moderately important, though I think the chance is higher than “small-ish” (despite the fact that I think insects are 100% conscious/​sentient). I come at it from a non-materialist physicalist stance on consciousness, assuming that suffering is (super roughly) proportional to the energy of the electromagnetic field in each nervous system times the degree of dissonance/​asymmetry in the field (quantified using some metric tbd). Given the size of many insects, the EM field they generate is very weak, so maybe the worst suffering an insect endures is just not too bad (maybe comparable to stubbing one’s toe lightly). But I’m not sure (especially about how suffering scales with size), so I still think there’s some chance the suffering is quite bad.

  (Thanks for posting this, @Bentham’s Bulldog! I enjoyed reading it. 🙂)

• Alfredo Parra 🔸Apr 18, 2025, 2:08 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Cullen 🔸’s comment on: Alfredo Parra ’s Quick takes

  I assume it’s the one I linked in my original post? Catherine announced it was discontinued. :/​

• Alfredo Parra 🔸Apr 18, 2025, 8:45 AM

  9 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Alfredo Parra ’s Quick takes

  Should the EA Forum facilitate donation swaps? 🤔 Judging from the number of upvotes on this recent swap ask and the fact that the old donation swap platform has retired, maybe there’s some unmet demand here? I myself would like to swap donations later this year. Maybe even a low-effort solution (like an open thread) could go a long way?

• Alfredo Parra 🔸Apr 7, 2025, 12:08 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Alfredo Parra ’s Quick takes

  My experience from the church is the salary doesn’t correlate will with likelihood of donating, although it does of course correlate with donating larger amounts of money.

  Yes, though I thought maybe among EAs there would be some correlation. 🤷

  I think I was assuming people working in highly paid AI jobs were donating larger percentages of their income, but I haven’t seen data in either direction?

  Yeah, me neither (which, again, is probably true; just not in my circles).

• Alfredo Parra 🔸Apr 7, 2025, 10:01 AM

  34 points

  9 ∶ 0

  on: Alfredo Parra ’s Quick takes

  Am I wrong that EAs working in AI (safety, policy, etc.) and who are now earning really well (easily top 1%) are less likely to donate to charity?

  At least in my circles, I get the strong impression that this is the case, which I find kind of baffling (and a bit upsetting, honestly). I have some just-so stories for why this might be the case, but I’d rather hear others’ impressions, especially if they contradict mine (I might be falling prey to confirmation bias here since the prior should be that salary correlates positively with likelihood of donating among EAs regardless of sector).

  What links here?

  • Cullen 🔸's comment on Ozzie Gooen’s Quick takes by Ozzie Gooen (Apr 21, 2025, 5:16 AM; 4 points)