Thanks for the good points. Here is the same graph for the United States (US). The income before tax of the 1 % of people with the most income was supposedly 20.4 % in 1913, and 20.7 % in 2024. I am sharing data for the US because it covers a long period (111 years), and "has been the world's largest economy since about 1900" until 2015.

I remain open to bets against short timelines for transformative AI (TAI), or what they supposedly imply, up to 10 k$. Do you see any that we could make?

Spencer Greenberg has a related essay. 50 “Laws” of Everything.

Hello. You may be interested in how the distribution of income before tax (not wealth) has evolved across time. The 1 % of people with the highest income had around 20 % of the total income before tax both now, and 200 years ago.

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 Fischer’s 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 “realistic biological possibilities”. For sentience-adjusted welfare ranges proportional to “individual number of neurons”^“exponent”, and “exponent” 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.

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:

1. Tell them to read and review more carefully, look for opposing arguments, etc..
2. Downvote such comments (and I very very rarely downvote).
3. Stop engaging with this person, because it wastes my time and may encourage them to waste others' time.

Makes sense. I just think what is "poor understanding" 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 "consciousness" and "phenomenal consciousness" interchangeably, but they do so implicitly rejecting strong illusionism, would reject strong illusionism if asked directly, and typically don't understand strong illusionism. Maybe many are open, though, I'm not sure.

Makes sense. I was not clear. However, by "without wanting to take a stance on illusionism or realism", I meant many do not have a good picture of what strong illusionism means (and may be conflating it with eliminativism), and therefore are not taking a stance of the correct version of illusionism. 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 it's also important to tag that it’s 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 "consciousness" and "phenomenal consciousness" 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.

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/subjective 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 "magic" 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 aren't 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 "externally generated experiences".

I [Vasco] am still endorsing (physical) realism

I meant that phenomenal consciousness is real in the sense "real" is used in common language, but I see now this is not what realism is about. "Real" 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 "experience" are used in arguably unconventional ways.

(I shall use the term ‘experience’ 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/realism 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, ‘what-it’s-like’ 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 Fischer's related book. Below are the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges proportional to "individual number of neurons"^"exponent", and "exponent" 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 Bob’s 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 Bob's related book which I understand inform your own estimates a lot.

I agree we cannot rule out very narrow welfare ranges. However, I now also think the probability of sentience of invertebrates may be much lower than e.g. 1 %, although I find it difficult to pinpoint the expected value of distributions of the probability of sentience (or welfare range).