I am a generalist quantitative researcher. I am open to volunteering and paid work. I welcome suggestions for posts. You can give me feedback here (anonymously or not).
Vasco Grilošø
Karma: 11,984
Hi Yarrow. Thanks sharing your thoughts.
As with Caroline Ellison, I donāt think anyone is saying that someone who has done something morally egregious should not be able to get a job or should be excluded from society. But does Caroline Ellison need to continue working in a financial role?
Suppose the probability of Caroline committing illegal actions at Manifund is similar to that of typical hires for similar roles. Would you still oppose Austin hiring Caroline? If so, would you also oppose Austin hiring Caroline for any other role at Manifund? If so, why?
For large grants, I do them. I would be very happy to have your analysis help me here.
You are welcome to get in touch if any opportunities arise.
If you have grants or projects you are very interested in, let me know, and I will take them into consideration, especially if you have lots of analysis for them.
I will keep this in mind.
Hi Barbara. Welcome to posting on the EA Forum.
Take a school-plates initiative that shifts institutional meals toward plant-based defaults. On any single scale it may look middling. But its counterfactual case may be stronger than any one metric shows, because a fair accounting would convert those effects into a common currency rather than penalising the intervention for succeeding on more than one front.
I think funding i) some interventions that very cost-effectively decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (like those supported by the Climate Fund (CF)), and ii) some other interventions that very cost-effectively increase the welfare of farmed animals (like those supported by the Animal Welfare Fund (AWF)) is better than funding iii) interventions that decrease GHG emissions and increase the welfare of farmed animals, but do not achieve either very cost-effectively (like School Plates, I believe). I estimated School Plates in 2023 increased the welfare of farmed animals 19.4 % as cost-effectively as cage-free corporate campaigns helping hens.
Conversion, not addition, is the operation that matters here, and it is easy to get wrong: suffering-adjusted days, tonnes of CO2-equivalent, and disability-adjusted life years cannot be summed, because the units do not combine.
The benefits to farmed animals can be compared with the benefits to humans of decreasing GHG emissions. I think the benefits to farmed animals from replacing chicken meat with beef or pork are much larger than the harm this causes to humans due to increased GHG emissions.
My concern is a potential future in which AI effectively takes over the skilled labor niche, and this eliminates an important rung on the proverbial ladder low skilled workers have traditionally used to improve their social and economic status.
Fair.
Nobody likes being stuck in a dead end job, and the outcome the article proposes (at least, the more pessimistic parts of the forecast) sounds like the majority of the population effectively trapped in a pre-determined economic caste with little to no meritocratic means of escape.
I think pre-determined economic conditions are not necessarily bad. I guess people will be happy if they have a high income (considering all sources), even if they do not have a job. I assume this is mostly the case for people who have retired in high income countries.
Brian ToĀmasik on comĀparĀing welfare across species
Hello. Welcome to the EA Forum. I am not familiar with feudalism, but I think what matters is increasing welfare. You may be interested in the podcast episode Liberalism Forever.
Hi Laura. You may want to join EA Lisbonās WhatsApp group, and ask around there.
Hi Marcus. How often do you rely on quantitative analyses to inform your grantmaking at Falcon Fund? I would be happy to review related docs or sheets for free if useful, and I am open to performing analyses from scratch too.
Hi. Have you considered asking people about moral weight being above exactly 0 instead of consciousness? I think what ultimately matters is moral weight, and asking about consciousness leads to lots of confusion due to different people having different definitions/āconcepts of it in mind. Relatedly, I agree with Brian Tomasik on the following.
It doesnāt make sense to ask questions like, Does a computer program of a mind really instantiate consciousness? That question reifies consciousness as a thing that may or may not be produced by a program. Rather, the particles constituting the computer just moveāand thatās it. The question of whether a given physical operation is āconsciousā is not a factual dispute but a definitional one: Do we want to define consciousness as including those sorts of physical operations?
I found this very funny! At the same time, I wonder if writing this sort of post may make one a little bit less open minded than optimal about AI risk.
Readers of this post may be interested in Brian Tomasikās post Bacteria, Plants, and Graded Sentience.
LiberĀalĀism Forever
Hi Grace. Thanks for sharing. Are you planning to rely on quantitative analysis of some sort? I would be happy to review related docs or sheets for free if useful, and I am open to performing analyses from scratch too.
Hi Leonard. Great point. I agree. I think it would be better for the focus to be on the FLOPS and moral weight per FLOPS.
I do not think a post being difficult to assess makes its existence worse than nothing (which is the bar to meet for a ban). I believe they are fine as long as they do not become too visible, and cause too many people to read it without getting value out of it. I do not see much risk of this. If a post is difficult to assess, it will have little karma, and therefore not gain much visibility.
Decreasing the assessment cost would be good, but there are a few elements already in place to achieve it. The estimated reading time, automatically generated summaries for long posts without one, disclaimer about the extent to which the post was written by AI, and karma, and number of posts and comments of the author (low karma relative to the number of posts and comments will tend to be associated with a less valuable post). If you are finding the assessmt cost too high, you might want to consider asking LLMs to go through posts for you, and just let you know about the ones which are expected to be valuable enough for you to check (based on some criteria that you describe). You can also ask for borderline cases to see if they are calibrated (the borderline cases should not be very worth checking or clearly not worth checking).
Hi Brad.
I guess I just would ask that people read stuff and evaluate it before condemning it. If something seems to be AI and you donāt want to read further, fine. But going on to condemn it simply on that basis seems very wrong to me. It seems very strange that in this community I am in a small minority thinking this.
I very much agree with your view. I think posts should be assessed on their merits, and that it is better to let the karma system work instead of limiting the number of comments and posts (e.g. written by AI or new users).
Good luck, I hope you win!
Thanks. Me too. I am thinking about suggesting to Greg doing a similar bet resolving at the end of 2030, where I would initially donate to Gregās preferred charity what I win from the 1st bet plus some more money. I could probably bet like 40 k$ in total, and then win 80 k$ adjusted for inflation or growth in stocks at the end of 2030.
Where would you now like the donation to go?
I would make a donation to Rethink Priorities (RP) restricted to research on moral weights led by Bob Fischer. Here is some context.
Hi Abraham. It looks like the 1st posts from new users are already being restricted to some extent. Michael Dickens said āSomebody has to be the one to read and upvote a new userās post first, or else it wonāt make it to the front pageā.
I think it is better to let the karma system work instead of limiting the number of comments and posts.
Hi Jim. Great post.
I do not think there is a fact of the matter about the location of the line separating A) and B). I would say it depends on the operationalisation of the claim under assessment, which should be falsifiable. Relatedly, I agree with Brian Tomasik that:
In the context of consciousness, I think the right move is i) considering all systems have more than exactly 0 moral value instead of ii) separating systems into ones that have exactly 0 moral weight, and ones that have more than exactly 0 moral weight. In the context of cluelessness, I believe the right move is i) considering the expected value (EV) of any 2 actions is comparable more or less robustly instead of ii) separating actions into ones whose EV is comparable, and ones whose EV is not comparable.