Vasco Grilo🔸

• Vasco Grilo🔸 24 May 2026 9:31 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: An­nounc­ing the Re­think Pri­ori­ties Cross-Cause Fund

  Hi Nick. Do you know about any public explanations of why indirect effects on macroarthropods like soil ants and termites are not included? I suspect you have in mind the comments below. However, they apply to plants, microorganisms, nematodes, and microarthropods, not to macroarthropods like soil ants and termites.

  Laura Duffy said on 17 July 2025:

  We didn’t do the welfare range calculations for plants, protists, nematodes, etc, because we don’t think the methodology is appropriate for organisms that lack a complex brain and/​or nervous system

  Bob Fischer said on 28 July 2025:

  1. It’s true that we don’t think you can take our methodology and extend it arbitrarily. We grant that it’s very difficult to draw a precise boundary. However, it’s standard to develop a model for a purpose and be wary about its application in a novel context. Very roughly, we take those novel contexts to be ones where the probability of sentience is extremely low. We acknowledge that we don’t have a precise cutoff for “extremely low,” as establishing such a cutoff would be a difficult research project in its own right. There are unavoidable judgment calls in this work.

  [...]

  3. We don’t think that the assumptions of our “mainline welfare ranges” imply anything about the welfare ranges of plants, nematodes, and microorganisms, as the models simply aren’t intended to be used the way you are using them. That’s why we aren’t replying to you about the welfare ranges of plants, nematodes, and microorganisms. We would need to do an independent project to form opinions on your questions. Right now, we don’t have the funding for that project.

  Bob said on 21 November 2025:

  On the macro-level issue of priorities, I’ve gathered some of my thoughts here.

  From the doc linked above:

  Second, I want to do good, not just good in expectation. So, as the probability of sentience drops, I become more wary. Insects are fairly close to my limit. Right now, we have some evidence for sentience in some insect orders, which I find reasonably compelling. However, it isn’t compelling primarily because it checks some number of boxes in Birch’s precautionary framework; instead, it’s compelling because of its breadth and richness. We have nothing like the evidence for sentience in Drosophila [small fruit fly] for mites, springtails, thrips, and the like. For that reason, we can respond to the stock objections to sentience in insects. We can’t do anything analogous for these smaller arthropods. (And recall that their brains are one or two orders of magnitude smaller than the brains of many insects. I doubt there’s a linear relationship between sentience and any such neurophysiological feature; at some point, I’m inclined to think that the probability falls off a cliff.)

  As I commented above, I estimate the effects of chicken welfare campaigns on ants and termites are much larger than those on chickens for the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges presented in Bob’s book. For this not to hold, I think the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges of ants and termites would have to be much lower than that of black soldier flies (BSFs). I would be surprised if this was the case under the methodology of Bob’s book. Godfrey et al. (2021) estimated 90 k neurons for a desert ant, and 92.5 k for a fruit fly (“vinegar fly”), and “individual number of neurons”^0.188 explains pretty well the welfare ranges in Bob’s book, as illustrated below.

  

• Vasco Grilo🔸 24 May 2026 9:03 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ryan Greenblatt’s comment on: Sur­vey of AI safety lead­ers on x-risk, AGI timelines, and re­source al­lo­ca­tion (Feb 2026)

  Thanks, Ryan. Buck and Ryan, do you see any bet I could make with any of you against short transformative AI (TAI) timelines, or what they supposedly imply, that is beneficial for both of us?

• Vasco Grilo🔸 23 May 2026 18:38 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 1

  on: An­nounc­ing the Re­think Pri­ori­ties Cross-Cause Fund

  Have you considered accounting for effects on soil invertebrates? One of the “key takeaways” from your work on risk aversion was that “Spending on corporate cage-free campaigns for egg-laying hens is robustly[8] cost-effective under nearly all reasonable types and levels of risk aversion considered here”. However, I think such campaigns can easily increase or decrease animal welfare accounting for effects on soil ants and termites. I estimate their effects on ants and termites are much larger than those on chickens for the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges presented in Bob Fischer’s book about comparing welfare across species. I suspect the vast majority of interventions perform worse than inaction accounting for effects on soil invertebrates under moderate levels of any type of risk aversion you considered (“avoiding the worst” risk aversion, difference-making risk aversion, and ambiguity aversion).

• Vasco Grilo🔸 23 May 2026 13:12 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Laura Duffy’s comment on: An­nounc­ing the Re­think Pri­ori­ties Cross-Cause Fund

  we aim to include more topics (which could include “meta” work and research) in future iterations of the model

  Good to know.

Pre­ma­ture dec­la­ra­tions on an­i­mal con­scious­ness hin­der progress

• Vasco Grilo🔸 22 May 2026 18:53 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: An­nounc­ing the Re­think Pri­ori­ties Cross-Cause Fund

  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.

• Vasco Grilo🔸 22 May 2026 18:35 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Laura Duffy’s comment on: An­nounc­ing the Re­think Pri­ori­ties Cross-Cause Fund

  Thanks for the links, Laura. To clarify, I meant to ask whether you have considered making recommendations that specifically target decreasing the key uncertainties that matter for cross-cause prioritisation. For example, decreasing uncertainty about welfare comparisons across species by supporting work like RP’s moral weight project.

• Vasco Grilo🔸 22 May 2026 15:59 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 1

  on: An­nounc­ing the Re­think Pri­ori­ties Cross-Cause Fund

  Thanks for your work on this.

  • We modeled key uncertainties that matter for cross-cause prioritization: moral weights, time discounting, risk attitudes, aggregation across ethical views, AI-related uncertainty, and empirical uncertainty within each giving opportunity.

  Have you considered making recommendations for people who do not have definitive views about the topics above? For example, question 1 of the Donor Compass asks about how much animal welfare whould factor into funding decisions, as illustrated below. I understand each option is represented by a set of point estimates describing welfare comparisons across species, but I do not undorse any particular set. I can see reasonable best guesses ranging from “Only humans matter [in practice]” to “Animals matter, but somewhat less than humans”. So I think the priority should be decreasing uncertainty instead of acting based on a given set of best guesses.

  

• Vasco Grilo🔸 21 May 2026 17:10 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 1

  in reply to: TFD’s comment on: Yar­row Bouchard’s Quick takes

  Hi TFD. Great points.

• Vasco Grilo🔸 21 May 2026 9:49 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: Yar­row Bouchard’s Quick takes

  Maybe? I personally would be much more discouraged from posting by a public comment than a private message. However it’d be nice if we could have a live log somewhere where forum users could see that we dm’d an anonymous user.

  Yes, I can see many people preferring a private message. One could ask people whether they would be fine with the private message being made public.

  I also think public messages are more valuable when the moderation is more contentious, and this makes them less embarrassing because it will be less clear that people did something wrong.

• Vasco Grilo🔸 21 May 2026 9:30 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: Yar­row Bouchard’s Quick takes

  I can see both general guidance and specific examples about how to improve comments being useful. I believe they are often more effective together.

  I appreciate being able to send someone a more casual message for butting up against guidelines rather than having to call them out publicly (which is a far more embarassing result of what can be a fairly minor infraction).

  I feel like it should often be possible to give guidance to someone in public without embarassing them. One could explicitly say the infraction is minor, and use a casual tone. Public moderation may help reinforce good discussion norms in addition to increasing transparency.

  One section from that post raises the concept of ‘Asymmetric effort ratios’. This is definitely part of our moderation decision. At one point, if I remember correctly, you wrote almost a fifth of the words on the Forum in a week. You are very productive of long comments, which are often packed with difficult to dispel misunderstandings. This is part of why a rate-limit was the solution we arrived at. In small doses, you can be a valuable contributor, but without limit, it becomes unfairly taxing on your interlocutors.

  I do not think the number of comments people can write should be greatly limited due to them having written long comments (supposedly) packed with difficult to dispel misunderstandings (I am not saying this applies to Yarrow or not; I do not know which comments you have in mind). Readers can lightly or strongly downvote comments they do not find useful, disagree with them, and point out clear mistake. What is a difficult to dispel misunderstanding is quite subjective. So effective moderation here seems difficult to me.

  When writing a lot is the problem (I personally do not think this can by itself be a problem), it would be better for the rate limit to be defined in terms of words per week instead of number of comments per week? Alternatively, there could be a limit for the number of words, and a less strict limit for the number of comments.

• Vasco Grilo🔸 20 May 2026 18:14 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Arepo’s comment on: The Good­hart Singularity

  Hi Sasha. I have only made such bets with Greg Colbourn and David Manheim. I have proposed similar bets many times. People with short timelines usually say they had better take a loan from a bank, which is fair. They do not expect to pay it fully due to a global catastrophe, or expect to pay part of it super easily due to extreme abundance. On the other hand, I suspect many of them have not taken loans up to the point of marginal borrowed money being neutral (instead of beneficial) under their views about AI.

• Vasco Grilo🔸 20 May 2026 16:56 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Can AI be Con­scious? Biolog­i­cal Nat­u­ral­ism as a Re­search Program

  Thanks for sharing, Bob. I think this research is valuable.

  What are your thoughts on the pen and paper argument against computational functionalism (CF)? I am open to consciousness being possible in non-biological systems, but I reject CF. I do not see how any set of AND, OR, and NOT operations could itself be conscious (even if implemented with pen and paper). Digital computers are implementations of these operations. So I do not think they can be conscious.

• Vasco Grilo🔸 20 May 2026 16:41 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Why are longter­mists so much less fo­cused on hu­man ex­tinc­tion these days?

  Hi Michelle.

  Preventing humans from going extinct in the next decade continues to affect the future indefinitely—human extinction seems like a clear ‘lock-in’ event.

  Why so? Something being locked in forever is not sufficient for longterm benefits?

  Suppose the European Union’s (EU’s) ban on housing chickens in battery cages is locked in forever, in the sense the vast majority of farmed chickens in the countries which currently belong to the EU will forever be outside cages. This does not mean the marginal advocacy for the ban had longterm benefits. I think the number of chickens in cages in 1 M years would have been the same in expectation if the spending advocating for the ban had been e.g. 10 k$ smaller. I would estimate the benefits from “increase in the probability of the ban”*”acceleration in the transition to cage-free conditional on the ban being passed”. I believe this last factor is like 3 to 10 years, thus preventing astronomical benefits.

  Why departing from the logic above for “longtermist interventions”? One could define these interventions as ones which depart from the logic above, but the question then is whether such interventions exist.

• Vasco Grilo🔸 20 May 2026 9:41 UTC

  8 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: Yar­row Bouchard’s Quick takes

  Thanks for the clarifications, Toby. They made sense to me.

• Vasco Grilo🔸 20 May 2026 8:42 UTC

  5 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Yarrow Bouchard 🔸’s comment on: Yar­row Bouchard’s Quick takes

  Thanks for sharing, Yarrow. @Toby Tremlett🔹, have you considered being transparent about the reasons for soft and hard bans? I think the EA Forum used to have a thread where they were announced. I believe transparency is important to keep the moderation team accountable.

  In my understanding (which could be wrong), they want the EA Forum to be more of a collaborative space where contributors are uplifted, and not have too much emphasis on debate or criticism. And/​or they just fundamentally disagree with what I think and the way I think (e.g., they think that what I take to be the cruxes of disagreements in many cases is not what’s really the crux), to such an extent they don’t think it’s productive to discuss on the EA Forum. So, an editorial decision.

  I have limited context. However, based on the above, I get the impression a soft ban is not justified. I do not think people should be banned due to disagreements with their thinking.

• Vasco Grilo🔸 20 May 2026 8:20 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Un­solved re­search prob­lems on the road to AGI

  Hi Yarrow. Great post.

• Vasco Grilo🔸 19 May 2026 13:12 UTC

  6 points

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  on: The Good­hart Singularity

  I remain open to bets against short AI timelines, or what they supposedly imply, up to 10 k$.

The Good­hart Singularity

• Vasco Grilo🔸 18 May 2026 8:05 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Vince Mak 🔸’s comment on: An­nounc­ing ACE’s 2025 Char­ity Recommendations

  ACE influencing significantly more funding than we distribute directly, this influence varying by charity

  You have estimates for the additional funding charities get as a result of your recommendation (accounting for additional grants from ACE, and donations from individual donors)? If so, you could analyse the cost-effectiveness of that additional funding.

  it being especially difficult to estimate for charities we haven’t recommended before

  Have you considered assessing the marginal cost-effectiveness of charities you have recommended in the past, and the overall cost-effectiveness of charities you have never recommended?

  [...] For THL’s plans to expand the Open Wing Alliance, for instance, we assessed the cost-effectiveness (and theory of change) of the OWA itself, not THL’s overall cost-effectiveness.

  [...] For these reasons and others, I’m not sure investigating the marginal cost-effectiveness of OWA Europe and Africa specifically would have been the best use of limited evaluation time, but we do that kind of analysis when we think it’s decision-relevant.

  The programs from THL you assessed had a cost of 7.96 M$ (= (7.65 + 0.311)*10^6), 19.9 (= 7.96*10^6/​(399*10^3)) times the amount you granted to THL in 2025. I understand you made more funding go to THL than what you granted, but still significantly less than 19.9 times as much? If so, I think the cost-effectiveness analysis could have focussed on more marginal spending. I believe the marginal cost-effectiveness of large programs could be significantly lower than their overall cost-effectiveness. THL’s programs are quite large. So I would have thought that assessing their marginal cost-effectiveness is especially important.