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 Grilođ¸
Karma: 11,916
Hallerâs Rule and Sentience Per Unit Biomass. Here is a related post from Brian Tomasik.
This article suggests that the ratio of brain metabolism to total body metabolism may be roughly constant.
If so, my results would be similar assuming welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to âbrainâs BMR at 25 ÂşCâ^âexponent of the brainâs BMRâ instead of âBMR [of the body] at 25 ÂşCâ^âexponent of the BMRâ.
Hi Thomas. I think the risk of human extinction until 2035 is something like 10^-7.
Is ConÂsciousÂness EveryÂwhere?
The groups are defined to some extent in the footnote I mentioned. I would say it is useful to have some information about the factors affecting the income of people with more or fewer years of formal education.
Do you think a precise definition is needed to understand the post?
Hi Saarth.
Can you do this same analysis for Top10% wealthy individuals versus remaining 90%, globally, and share the analysis of how income inequality trends through AI infra renting? Geographical boundaries are irrelevant today especially for how capital flows.
I am not the author.
This is a crosspost for What Will AI Do To Global Inequality? by Oliver Kim, Karthik Tadepalli, and Joseph Levine
You have not defined what skilled & unskilled labour means. Is a management consultant more or less skilled than a plumber?
Did you see this footnote?
âSkilledâ and âunskilledâ are somewhat unfortunate terms that are nonetheless commonly used by economists. There is nothing that is âunskilledâ about sewing a t-shirt, or scratching a living out of the earth as a subsistence farmer. (Iâve written about the working conditions by supposedly âunskilledâ workers in Ethiopia.) Perhaps a more accurate delineation would be âjobs requiring a formal educationâ and âjobs that do not require a formal educationâ.
âSkilled workers earn more than unskilled workers, with the âskill premiumâ determined by the global supply of unskilled labor vs skilled labor.â This assumption is clearly false.
I think the authors just mean people with more years of formal education tend to earn more. Do you disagree?
Hi Chris. Thanks for the clarifications. I agree including more effects on wild animals would be difficult. Note my question was whether you have âconsidered excluding effects on wild animals (such as wild fishes used for feed)â. You might have read âincludingâ instead of âexcludingâ. Would it be better to exclude effects on all wild animals? It could be that the wild fishes used for feed would have suffered more if they were not caught.
Hi Seth. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree.
What Will AI Do To Global InequalÂity?
I would be happy to review your estimates of the SROI of the grants for free if you think it may be useful.
Hello ion. Welcome to the EA Forum. On 1, I am open to bets against short timelines for transformative AI (TAI), or what they supposedly imply, up to 10 k$. On 2, the environmental and survival pressures are to a significant extent established by humans, who are the ones setting up the training of AIs?
Hi Jim. There is no particular reason. I have just been sharing content I find interesting. My views about AI risk have not changed much recently. I guess the risk of human extinction over the next 10 years is something like 10^-7.
How Fast Is Post-AGI Growth?
Hi Jienna. Thanks for the update.
Corrected days-of-suffering formula. The old formula multiplied indirect impacts (like feed fish and pre-slaughter mortality) by the primary animalâs lifespan. A wild-caught anchovy used as feed suffers for one day regardless of what eats them. The corrected formula treats indirect impacts separately.
Have Faunalytics and Bryant Research (@Chris Bryant đ¸ or @Richie?) considered excluding effects on wild animals (such as wild fishes used for feed)? I am very uncertain about whether expanding agricultural land increases or decreases the welfare/âsuffering/âhappiness of soil invertebrates, and I believe effects on these may be much larger than the effects on farmed animals and wild animals used for feed.
I also do not know whether decreasing the catch of wild fishes for feed increases or decreases animal welfare. Michael St. Jules concluded âdecreasing the catch of wild aquatic animals for feed is likely to decrease aquaculture and increase insect farming, but has unclear effects on brine shrimp nauplii and other live feedâ.
Hello Kearney and Melanie. Thanks for the update.
Weighting each grantâs modeled social return on investment [SROI] by its funding amount gives a mean of roughly 5,500x â though these are early, uncertain estimates.
How do you estimate the benefits of a career transition in CG$ (1 CG$ is the value of giving 1 $ to someone earning 50 k$/âyear)? Have you considered estimating this from the product between the marginal SROI of the organisation benefiting from the transition, and their willingness to pay for the transition?
The most common grants were to EA-affiliated career advising programs and high-impact fellowship programs in Sweden, France, Israel, Norway, Estonia, and Poland. These were explicitly evaluated by how many high-impact career transitions could be facilitated per unit of budget cost, and measured against our bar.
How did you evaluate the other organisations?
Based on our cost-effectiveness estimates for about 85% of the recommended grants, weighted by funding, every dollar invested is expected to create about $5,500 of social benefit.
Which % of funding is covered by the 85 % of grants for which you estimates the cost-effectiveness?
Of the 28 grants, 13 are cause-neutral, supporting high-impact transitions across our priority areas. The other 15 overlap strongly with one or two specific cause areas, with global health and development the heaviest concentration. We set out to focus on mid-career and senior professionals (much existing infrastructure skews toward students), and on LMIC talent pipelines, where many high-impact organizations operate but career infrastructure remains thin. The bigger surprise was about the ecosystem itself. We estimated a 25% chance weâd receive more than 40 applications; we got almost 500. We also came in assuming weâd fund far fewer proposals and give away considerably less money.
That is an impressive number of applications. I like that you shared a forecast you made for the number of applications despite it being far off.
That makes sense. I do not know what the ideal giving multiplier on total spending is, but I think the marginal giving multiplier should be close to 1 (assuming it accounts for all effects). Spending should increase if it is above 1 because this would mean spending 1 $ more would lead to more than 1 $ of benefits.
Hi Fin. Great post. I have also become persuaded by illusionism since I started learning about it in June 2026 (after reading this comment from @Michael St Jules đ¸). You may be interested in chapter 9, âLosing Your Religion: Ethics After Illusionismâ, of François Kammererâs book âHouse of Mirrors: The Illusion of Phenomenal Consciousnessâ.
Thanks for the helpful clarifications.
Thanks for the question and sorry for the slow reply.
No worries. I would say 5 days is a short time. I also do not think it makes sense for me to believe people should reply faster without knowing what they are prioritising instead, although I sometimes send reminders to ensure my messages were seen, or not forgotten.
So, we assumed that the interventions THL carried out each affected 6 to 15x as many hens than reported on average through speeding up the timelines to hens becoming cage-free.
Note the benefits of accelerating the end of the cage-free implementation by N years while not accelerating the start of it are 50 % as large as the benefits from accelerating both the start and end of the cage-free implementation by N years.
Then, since the marginal cost-effectiveness in 2026 is probably much less than the average cost-effectiveness from 2015-2024, we discounted the resulting THL self-reported estimate by 70%. This is a rough guess.
The marginal cost-effectiveness in 2026 is probably lower than the average cost-effectiveness in 2025. So ACEâs estimate for the average cost-effectiveness in 2025 should also be discounted (by less than 70 %)?
If you know of any good marginal cost-effectiveness estimates, or other cost-effectiveness estimates, please do link them below!
Here are estimates for the cost-effectiveness of Animaâs work targeting McDonalds in Norway from 2026 on to increase the welfare of broilers. They are based on guesses from Niklas Fjeldberg and Toby Schiønning.
Hallerâs Rule and Sentience Per Unit Biomass. Here is a related post from Brian Tomasik.