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: 11,574
If someone had a pattern of fabrication and very poor understanding (and apparent confidence) like LLMs often do if used uncritically, I would be annoyed with them and possibly do any of the following:
Tell them to read and review more carefully, look for opposing arguments, etc..
Downvote such comments (and I very very rarely downvote).
Stop engaging with this person, because it wastes my time and may encourage them to waste othersâ time.
Makes sense. I just think what is âpoor understandingâ is often sufficiently contentious for one to have a high bar for preferring not sharing over sharing with little verification. I also tend to default to let people decide the extent to which they want to engage with something.
My impression is that many people, including academics, use âconsciousnessâ and âphenomenal consciousnessâ interchangeably, but they do so implicitly rejecting strong illusionism, would reject strong illusionism if asked directly, and typically donât understand strong illusionism. Maybe many are open, though, Iâm not sure.
Makes sense. I was not clear. However, by âwithout wanting to take a stance on illusionism or realismâ, I meant many do not have a good picture of what strong illusionism means, and may be conflating it with eliminativism. I was doing this to some extent.
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
Verification is often easier than generation.
LLMs make it easy to produce a lot of plausible-looking but wrong or misleading claims quickly, and sharing them without checking yourself (or at least running another LLM to do that) puts the burden on others to correct.
This also applies to many comments written by people? In general, whenever something is shared, one could invest more time to make it more accurate. However, to me it seems hard to come up with general rules about how much time to invest vetting claims.
I agree that itâs also important to tag that itâs LLM output, and at least read it over yourself, which you did.
I think sharing long texts produced by LLMs is often fine even if they were not fully read by the person prompting, basically for the same reasons that it is fine to share long text produced by people even if the person sharing them did not fully read them.
Strong illusionists reject phenomenal consciousness. Specifically they reject phenomenal properties; they accept that consciousness exists.
I have the impression many people, including academics, use âconsciousnessâ and âphenomenal consciousnessâ interchangeably, and without wanting to take a stance on illusionism or realism. I think this is one reason strong illusionists saying they reject phenomenal consciousness is sometimes misinterpreted as them rejecting the illusion of phenomenal consciousness.
What Is It Like to Be a Bass? Red HerÂrings, Fish Pain and the Study of AnÂiÂmal Sentience
Thanks, Michael.
I would recommend against passing along LLM outputs uncritically like this
Do you mean you recommend against sharing them, even if the alternative is not sharing anything (I agree sharing them, and examining them would be better)? Sharing them could lead to them being corrected to the extent they are not accurate, as you just did, which is good? Maybe you mean they should be shared with a quick disclaimer that the claims were not checked.
Does Lau explain why people so often regard consciousness as non-physical, ethereal, having classic qualia properties, or some qualitative/âsubjective character beyond just the physical? Or does he reject that people often do regard consciousness this way?
I do not recall Lau discussing the above in the few articles and podcasts I checked. I do not think Lau would reject that people often regard consciousness that way.
Is this section trying to say the non-physical âmagicâ is real? If not, how does it contradict illusionism?
I believe the section is trying to say that phenomenal consciousness exists. I agree this would not contradict illusionism. It would only contradict eliminativism.
Would you agree that dreams, thoughts and visualizations arenât phenomenally conscious experiences, but your externally generated experiences are phenomenally conscious?
I would say dreams and thoughts are phenomenally conscious experiences. I am not sure what you mean by âexternally generated experiencesâ.
I meant that phenomenal consciousness is real in the sense ârealâ is used in common language, but I see now this is not what realism is about. âRealâ as used in common language can mean something that exists. However, illusionists acknowledge that phenomenal consciousness exists. They just argue it is not real in the sense it does not have the classic qualia properties. I seem to agree with this.
Having a better look into Frankish (2016) helped me understand what illusionism is actually about. I had only skimmed it quickly, and it is easy to misinterpret it on a quick skim because some terms like âexperienceâ are used in arguably unconventional ways.
(I shall use the term âexperienceâ itself in a functional sense, for the mental states that are the direct output of sensory systems. In this sense it is not definitional that experiences are phenomenally conscious.)
Would you do anything differently if you endorsed weak illusionism/ârealism as defined in Frankish (2016) instead of (strong) illusionism?
Illusionism makes a very strong claim: it claims that phenomenal consciousness is illusory; experiences do not really have qualitative, âwhat-itâs-likeâ properties, whether physical or non-physical. This should be distinguished from a weaker view according to which some of the supposed features of phenomenal consciousness are illusory. Many conservative realists argue that phenomenal properties, though real, do not possess the problematic features sometimes ascribed to them, such as being ineffable, intrinsic, private, and infallibly known. Phenomenal feels, they argue, are physical properties which introspection misrepresents as ineffable, intrinsic, and so on. We might call this weak illusionism, in contrast to the strong form advocated here. (It might equally be called weak realism.)4
Hi James. Thanks for the post.
I agree there is huge uncertainty in the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges Rethink Priorities (RP) initially presented, and the similar ones in Bob Fischerâs related book. Below are the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges proportional to âindividual number of neuronsâ^âexponentâ, and âexponentâ from 0 to 2, which covers the best guesses that I consider reasonable.
An exponent of 0.188 explains pretty well the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges in Bobâs book, as illustrated below. Here is some context about why sentience-adjusted welfare ranges might be a power law of the individual number of neurons.
People could then change the pain intensity ratios, and sentience-adjusted welfare range to get their own estimates if they want.
Here is a comment from Bob Fischer with context about the uncertainty in the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges Rethink Priorities (RP) initially presented, and the similar ones in Bobâs related book which I understand inform your own estimates a lot.
Hi Jim. The probability of sentience would be relevant if the welfare range dropped very fast as the probability of sentience decreases. For example, if âwelfare rangeâ = âprobabiltyâ^âexponentâ, and âexponentâ is very high. For instance, an exponent of 5 would lead to a 10 % chance of sentience resulting in a welfare range of 10^-5 (= 0.1^5), and therefore in a sentience-adjusted welfare range of 10^-6 (= 0.1*10^-5). However, it is unclear to me why the probability of sentience and welfare would relate in that way. So the point of your post remains.
Hi Michael. Thanks for sharing.
It was Grazianoâs papers (2021, 2022, some clarifications in 2020) that made illusionism click for me
I found the article from 2022 clarifying (I have not looked into the other 2), but I am still endorsing (physical) realism. I have found persuasive Hakwan Lauâs views about consciousness. So I asked Gemini âWhat would Lau say about strong illusionism?â. The answer is below. It makes a lot of sense to me. I would be curious to know your thoughts. I wonder whether disagreements between illusionists and realists are largely semantic.
Hakwan Lau is fundamentally opposed to strong illusionism. While he agrees with illusionists that our introspection is imperfect and fails to reveal the physical mechanics of our brains, he completely rejects their conclusion that this makes phenomenal consciousness a âfalse beliefâ or a non-existent property.
In his book In Consciousness We Trust, Lau argues that strong illusionism throws the baby out with the bathwater. Here is how he dismantles the strong illusionist position:
1. Macro-Level Summaries are Not âIllusionsâ
Strong illusionists (like Graziano, Dennett, and Frankish) argue that because our internal models donât represent the micro-physical details of our neural wiring, the non-physical âmagicâ they report must be a hallucination.
Lau counters this with a functional analogy: macroscopic metrics are real, even if they ignore microscopic details. When a digital thermometer gives you a reading of 20°C, it is not giving you a detailed map of the kinetic energy of billions of individual air molecules. It is giving you a simplified, macroscopic summary. But that doesnât mean âtemperatureâ is an illusion or a false belief.
Similarly, Lauâs Perceptual Reality Monitoring (PRM) argues that the prefrontal cortex generates a macroscopic summary of sensory reliability. It evaluates a signal and outputs a tag: This is real and present. Just because that tag lacks the metadata of neurotransmitter release doesnât make the resulting subjective experience an illusion. It is a highly accurate, biologically real computational output.
2. The Fallacy of the âPerfectâ Introspection
Illusionism relies on the premise that for consciousness to be real, it must perfectly match our intuitive, pre-scientific introspective beliefs about it (i.e., that it is magical, ethereal, or non-physical). Because science proves it isnât magical, illusionists conclude it isnât real.
Lau points out that this is an unfair standard. Science routinely redefines phenomena without eliminating them. When we discovered that water is HâO rather than an indivisible classical element, we didnât declare that water was an illusion. Lau argues we should treat consciousness the same way: it isnât the magical inner theater we intuitively thought it was, but rather a physical, metacognitive reality-monitoring system. Redefining it doesnât erase its existence.
3. The Evolutionary Reality of âPresenceâ
Strong illusionists argue that the âfeelingâ of experience is just an evolutionary trick to force an organism to care about its environment.
Lau argues that the brain has a much more specific, computationally vital need for this feeling: it must distinguish reality from its own internal noise. A brain constantly generates internal imageryâdreams, memories, imagination, and predictive models. If an organism cannot tell the difference between a memory of a predator and a real predator right in front of it, it will not survive.
For Lau, subjective consciousness is that mechanism. When the PRM system successfully tags a sensory signal as originating from the external world, it generates a feeling of undeniable âpresence.â That presence is not a trick; it is the correct computational answer to the problem of reality monitoring.
Summary
Lau would say that strong illusionists correctly identify that the brain uses simplified representations, but they make a fatal philosophical error in concluding that simplified representations are false. To Lau, subjective experience is the brainâs very real, very physical mechanism for anchoring us in reality.
Hi Cynthia. Thanks for the great context.
I wonder how much the results of the CSES study would change if the management practices were similarly good for both conditions (instead of worse for the cage-free chickens). You replied to my related question below that âMy [your] general sense is that option A leads to a greater welfare increaseâ.
Relatedly, I [Vasco] wonder how much welfare varies within production systems. For example, I am interested in knowing which of the following results in a greater increase in welfare. Layers going from:
A. Median furnished cages in the European Union (EU) to median cage-free aviaries in the EU. By median furnished cages in the EU, I mean ones with higher welfare per chicken-year than 50 % of the furnished cages in the EU.
B. 10th percentile furnished cages in the EU to 90th percentile furnished cages in the EU.
Do you have sense of how these compare?
~30% preference studies showing that hens really value the things they can only access in cage-free (nesting boxes, perches, dustbathing, etc)
The above is an argument against barren battery cages, but not against all types of cages? All caged chickens in the European Union (EU) must have âa nestâ, âlitter such that pecking and scratching are possibleâ, and âappropriate perches of at least 15 cmâ. Relatedly, I estimate moving hens from battery to furnished cages increases the welfare of chickens 70.6 % as much as moving hens from battery cages to cage-free aviaries.
Hi Abhi. Thanks for sharing.
Are you considering the risk of research on alternative proteins decreasing the welfare of farmed animals by decreasing the population of farmed animals with positive lives? I estimated cage-free layers and slower growth broilers have negative, but close to neutral lives. I am reasonably confident that caged layers and fast growth broilers have negative lives, but very uncertain about other cases. Here is an example of why this may matter in the context of eggs. 64.3 % (= 1 â 0.357) of layers in the European Union (EU) were outside cages in 2025. Funding work on alternative proteins does not have an immediate effect. It could be that it mostly reduces the consumption of eggs in 10 years, when the fraction of cage-free layers will likely be higher, and mortality lower due to improvements from experience. So I can see research on plant-based alternatives to eggs leading to fewer layers in the EU with positive lives.
Hi Matthew. Great post. I really like combinations of numbers and story-telling. I think they are a core motivation for people getting involved in effective giving.
Hi Huw. Thanks for sharing.
A vast and rapid injection of surplus labour into the global economy is potentially very bad
It is worth noting the speed and scope of an injection of surplus labour is not independent from how it impacts people. I am sceptical of a vast and rapid injection. However, if it happens, I would still expect it to be good.
In Praise of Job Destruction
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Thanks for your suggestion on how to present CEAs, weâll think about this further.
Great.
I think that existing disagregated (non scaled) metrics already allow us to make reasonable guesses for what is cost effective to help animals.
A greater spread of pain intensities would update me (at the margin) towards prioritising very painful welfare issues happening over a short time (in particular, just before slaughter) over less painful ones affecting the whole life of animals
I also wonder whether there are cases where the time in less intense pain is decreased cost-effectively, but the time in more intense pain is increased. In such cases, one would have to rely on views about pain intensities to determine whether there is a reduction in pain. The Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI) estimates that cage-free layers experience less annoying and hurtful pain than ones in furnished cages, but that it is unclear whether they experience more or less disabling and excruciating pain. âThe analysis primarily aimed to estimate the minimum welfare improvement associated with transitioning to cage-free housingâ. So it could be that cage-free layers also experience less disabling and excruciating pain. However, if this remains unclear accounting for all welfare issues as accurately as possible, and one believes disabling and excruciating pain are much more intense than annoying and hurtful pain, it could be unclear whether cage-free egg campaigns decrease or increase pain.
I am not confident that we will ever gain lots of clarity on scaling, as there are lots of known unknowns and reasonable disagreements on questions up and downstream from how to scale things (sentience, range, etc.)
I am also not confident. However, I think there is high value of information in making at least one good attempt to quantify the intensity of excruciating pain.
Given the subjective nature of pain, I am not convinced a survey sampling from such a specific group is particularly externally valid (I also donât know that any survey of humans will ever be externally valid to how weâd scale pain across other animals).
I agree comparisons across different pain intensities and species will remain very uncertain.
I replied to the last link here
I replied there.
I think we should aim to have secondary effects of interventions
Great to know. Do you have any concrete plans or timelines? If not, how much funding would you need?
Nitpick. I would not call effects on non-target individuals âsecondaryâ. I think they may be much larger than those on the target individuals (in expectation), and âsecundaryâ makes it sound like they are less important to consider.
I want to do it in a way that doesnât unnecessarily penalize/âreward areas where that data is/âis not available
Makes sense.
and to not have the effects of all interventions be dominated by deeply uncertain secondary impacts
What if, given reasonable moral and empirical views, we should in fact be very uncertain about whether practically any intervention is better or worse than nothing accounting for effects on non-target individuals? I think this would be useful to know. The model should not force the conclusion that interventions which have historically been supported by the effective altruism community (like saving human lives, and cage-free egg campaigns) are better than nothing for all reasonable moral and empirical views?
Hi Marcus. Thanks for the reply.
I wonder whether the initial testers included people with views on welfare comparisons across species similar to those that I, @NickLaing, @trammell, and @William_MacAskill have. None of us believe that animals matter exactly 0. However, we also have best guesses that the sentience-adjusted welfare range of shrimps should be much smaller than 0.1 % of that of humans. So our views would be described by an option where animal welfare matters much more than in âOnly humans matterâ (where animals matter exactly 0), but still significantly less than in âAnimals matter, but much less than humansâ (where the sentience-adjusted welfare range of shrimps is 0.1 % of that of humans).
I think adding an option with sentience-adjusted welfare ranges proportional to the individual number of neurons would let people specify their views. I suspect users would not be much bothered by having 5 options instead of 4. However, if keeping 4 options is important, I would add the option I suggested, and then have a single option replace the current intermediate options (âAnimals matter, but much less than humansâ, and âAnimals matter, but somewhat less than humansâ).
I understand one could use the advanced mode to specify other ways of comparing welfare across species. However, I am thinking that it is also important for the default options to cover the range of reasonable disagreement, and I believe a large part of that range for welfare comparisons across species is not covered with the current default options.
I think impact-focussed funders underrate research on animal sentience, and, more broadly, on comparing welfare across species. I believe there is huge uncertainty, and ways of decreasing it. Here is some context about my uncertainty. In Bob Fischerâs book about comparing welfare across species, the tentative sentience-adjusted welfare range of shrimps is 8.0 % of that of humans. Welfare range is defined there as the difference between the maximum and minimum welfare per unit time among ârealistic biological possibilitiesâ. For sentience-adjusted welfare ranges proportional to âindividual number of neuronsâ^âexponentâ, and âexponentâ from 0 to 2, which covers the best guesses that I consider reasonable, the sentience-adjusted welfare range of shrimps is 10^-12 to 1 times that of humans.