I am open to work.
Vasco Grilošø
Karma: 8,408
Thanks, Huw.
Iām struggling to see the connection between this post and your recommendation to donate to WAI.
In the past, Iāve heard that wild animal suffering is probably not very tractable. Is that true for both insects and vertebrates? [...]
Cost-effectiveness takes into account tractability, research on more humane pesticides looks super cost-effective, and WAI has supported work on that, although I do not know which fraction of the marginal donations to WAI funds that work.
What about WAI sets them up for success here? (You mention they support research into pesticides, but not direct work?)
WAI has been recommended by Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) since 2020. You may want to check their last review from 2023 (very brief summary below). My case for recommending WAI is mostly about figuring out ways of cost-effectively helping wild animals in the future, and building a movement and research field to enable that.
Wild Animal Initiative is a U.S.-based organization working to improve our understanding of wild animalsā lives by advancing the field of wild animal welfare science. By conducting their own research and supporting other wild animal researchers, Wild Animal Initiative aims to increase academic interest in wild animal welfare and identify evidence-based solutions to improving wild animalsā wellbeing.
Wild anĀiĀmal sufferĀing is suĀper neĀglected comĀpared with facĀtory-farmĀing, and this is suĀper neĀglected comĀpared with conĀflicts, epiĀdemics/āpanĀdemics, and global warming
Thanks for fighting for the voiceless, Matthew!
Great points, Marcus!
Here is an example of @Vasco Grilošø doing a pretty good critique of Sinergia that they should be trying to focus on their cage-free campaigning as opposed to meal replacement. That is extremely useful. Itās particularly useful because itās something that @Carolina GalvaniāSinergia Animal can engage with [Carolina is Sinergiaās founder and executive director], doesnāt assume Sinergia is lying, and additional reasons can then be given for why Sinergia might still want to do something etc.
Thanks for noting that! For readersā context, in that comment I made 4 months ago on a post from Carolina, I estimated based on Animal Charity Evaluatorsā (ACEās) cost-effectiveness analysis of Sinergia that their meal replacement program in 2023 was 0.107 % as cost-effective as their cage-free campaigns, which suggests it would be good to move funds from the former to the latter. I also shared the comment 3.5 months ago with @LChamberlain (Sinergiaās senior development manager), and LĆŗcia Perreira (Sinergiaās impact and strategy director). Both LChamberlain and LĆŗcia said they were going to have a look, but they have not followed up. I think posting about it, sharing a draft with Sinergia before the publication, would have led to a reply, or at least a faster reply. This could have been good if it had caused Sinergia to reflect on their prioritisation earlier, and eventually change their allocation of funds.
I feel like Animal Charity Evaluatorsā (ACEās) cost-effectiveness analysis overestimates your role in achieving the listed cage-free commitments. Among the 5 very big or giant ones driving their cost-effectiveness, 20 % of the impact is attributed to you in 2 cases, and 50 % in 1 case where you did not run a campaign or pre-campaign, and did not send a campaign notice.
The field is interested in looking more closely at valence independently of consciousness
Could you link the most relevant piece you are aware of? What do you mean by āindependentlyā? Under hedonism, I think the probability of consciousness only matters to the extent it informs the probability of valences experiences.
you could at least confirm that AIs donāt have valenced experience
Interesting! How?
Independently, weāre also very interested in how to capture the difference between positive and negative experiences in alien sorts of minds. It is often taken for granted based on human experience, but it isnāt trivial to say what it is.
Makes sense. Without that, it would be very hard to improve digital welfare.
Thanks for this great project! Do you also plan to estimate the welfare range conditional on consciousness, or the probability of positive or negative experiences conditional on consciousness?
If you do not put physical barriers, fish would move across different properties, making overfishing profitable anyway. It is like two āprivateā oil fields over the same oil reservoir.
Profitable for who? I am thinking companies owning some waters would charge fishing companies proportionally to how much they capture in their waters. Overfishing would eventually lead to no fish being captured in their areas, and therefore no revenue from fishing.
It is the canonical case for an immediate Pigovian tax: the externality is global, uniform, circulates in the atomosfereā¦ Regarding imports, you can charge a carbon tariff.
The increase in the death from non-optimal temperature is not uniform.
Thanks, Arturo.
I find this criticism not so good in general, because there are many externalities and āmeasuringā them means nothing. To some extent an externality is simply āwhat the market does not measure for usā, so Pigovianism is more a framework than a theory.
Right, quantifying the externalities is challenging. Privatisation of public goods makes the market measure more for us. Instead of setting up regulations to prevent overfishing, the oceans could be privatised, and then the companies owning them would have an incentive to prevent the collapse of fish stocks (otherwise, they would go out of fish, and therefore would no longer be able to charge fishing companies).
On the other hand, the lack of Pigovian taxes on carbon (the canonical case where the framework is almost a theory by itself) and the incredible roundabouts to avoid the simple and well known solution proves the utter disgrace that are our social systems.
I think global warming may well be beneficial in many regions. However, at least for countries wanting to decrease it, I suppose taxing CO2eq would make sense. One challenge is that people with lower income may spend relatively more on energy, so they would be relatively more affected by the higher energy prices resulting from taxing CO2eq, altghough this could be mitigated by disproportionally directing the tax revenue to such people. Another challenge is that countries taxing CO2eq would start importing more energy from countries that do not tax it.
ļPiĀgouās Dial
Love it.
Thanks for the post!
Conditional on metastability, the mean credence that vacuum decay is inducible with arbitrarily advanced technology was 19%, with a slim majority finding its likelihood negligible, but a substantial minority asserting high likelihood.
For context, the expected lifetime of the universe based on the natural rate of vacuum decay is estimated to be 10^790 years.
Thanks for the post, Tyler!
There are a lot of ways to arrange 86 billion neurons. You could give them to one human, to 430 rats, or to 86 billion nematodes.
The above implies nematodes have 1 neuron, but they have around 300 neurons. So 86 billion neurons correspond to around 300 M nematodes.
For classical utilitarians, āhedoniumā is likely many orders of magnitude more valuable than human brains (or the equivalent instantiated in silico).
I estimated the welfare range per calorie consumption of bees is 4.88 k times that of humans, which suggests bees produce welfare 4.88 k times as efficiently if welfare is proportional to the welfare range.
Hi Tom,
It depends on the organisations which would receive the additional donations. If the person quitting their job donates 10 % of their gross annual salary to an organisation 10 times as cost-effective as their initial organisation, their donations doubled as a result of quitting, there was no impact from direct work in the new organisation, and they were not replaced in their original organisation, their annual impact after quitting would become 1.82 (= (0 + 0.1*10*2)/ā(0.1 + 0.1*10)) times as large as their initial annual impact.
Cage-free egg proĀducĀtion and real gross doĀmesĀtic product per capita
Thanks, Bob! Based on that, my understanding is that the welfare ranges refer to differences between the welfare per unit time of the best and worst moments that could be realistically experieced (that are ārealistic biological possibilitiesā).
What is the period of time to which āmost intenseā refers to? Any period of time, or the typical lifespan of the species? If the former, the welfare ranges practically refer to the intensities of very short experiences (for example, the worst possible second is worse than a random second of the worst possible minute).
ļThe Selfish Machine
Thanks for clarifying, Steven! I am happy to think about advanced AI agents as a new species too. However, in this case, I would model them as mind children of humanity evolved through intelligent design, not Darwinian natural selection that would lead to a very adversarial relationship with humans.
Thanks, Gergo! I will have a look.