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).
I object to relying on infinities (not arbitrarily large finities) to guide decisions because they do not explain more empirical evidence than arbitrarily large finities.
I do not have an upper bound for counterfactual impact, but this does not mean it can be infinite. A normal distribution does not have a maximum value. It can take an arbitrarily large value. However, it cannot take an infinite value. Its range is the set of real numbers.
Here is a thought experiment that may be helpful. Imagine you had all the empirical/physical evidence about an animal, including all the "behavioural, physiological, neural, pharmacological, cognitive, evolutionary, and ecological evidence". There may be practical limits to how much one could know, but I am imagining a scenario where empirical/physical was fully eliminated. Would you be able to say whether the animal is sentient or not under the Welfare Footprint Framework (WFF)? If the probability of sentience is just supposed to capture empirical uncertainty under WFF, it would be either 0 or 1? For it to be higher than 0, and below 1, I think it would have to capture metaphysical or definitional uncertainty. If so, would it be better for WFF to cover just empirical uncertainty?
Under WFF, affective welfare either exists or does not exist at all. However, how can one justify such a binary distinction? Each type of empirical evidence, including "behavioural, physiological, neural, pharmacological, cognitive, evolutionary, and ecological evidence", exists on a spectrum. So I find it very counterintuitive that we could map empirical evidence to affective welfare either existing (sentience) or not existing at all (lack of sentience). I believe this would require assuming the existence of a sharp surface in the evidential space separating affective welfare existing from it not existing at all (even if there is uncertainty about the surface location), which is what feels arbitrary to me.
The user inputs a target taxon. The tool then determines, where necessary, two related but distinct scopes: one for the sentience gate and one for the affective-capacity analysis.
You may be interested in the article "Ethics Without Sentience: Facing Up to the Probable Insignificance of Phenomenal Consciousness" by François Kammerer. Here is a summary. Relatedly, you may like this and this very short posts by Keith Frankish. I agree with Keith that phenomenal consciousness does not exist. In any case, even if it exists, I agree with François it is not significant. Phenomenal consciousness as traditionally defined is not falsifiable (or, to be precise, it is traditionally defined such that one can only know about their own consciousness at the moment). In practice, one always has to come up with empirical proxies for it, but I feel these are largely arbitrary if it is not falsifiable. So I believe it would be better to focus just on what animals can do (as in your affective-capacity analysis), and not on assessing phenomenal sentience.
When I click on a given section of a post on the left pane, the URL shown at the top is still that of the post. It used to be the URL of the section. However, I can still link to a section by opening it in a new tab.
I wonder if the power required by brains is proportional to the number of neurons across very different species. It seems to be so among mammals. From Herculano-Houzel (2011):
Based on glucose and oxygen metabolic rates in awake animals and their recently determined numbers of neurons, here I show that, contrary to the expected, the estimated glucose use per neuron is remarkably constant, varying only by 40% across the six species of rodents and primates (including humans).
We tested demand in multiple ways. Apart from running user interviews, we ran a survey on the board asking what people were looking for (now with 800+ responses), and added full-time roles to the role-type filter (before we had any full-time listings), to see whether people would look for them organically. Full-time was the most mentioned role type in the survey and the most used filter. It also turned out 48% of the visitors to the board weren't using other popular boards to find EA roles (such as 80,000 Hours or Probably Good).
Have you considered letting visitors to the EA Opportunities Board know about the boards from 80,000 Hours and Probably Good? To which extent did people who knew about these boards still wanted full time roles in the EA Opportunities Board? If to a significant extent, why?
Hi Saulius. I think this is such a great post. I just reread it because it was shared in the last EA Forum newsletter.
I object to relying on infinities (not arbitrarily large finities) to guide decisions because they do not explain more empirical evidence than arbitrarily large finities.
I do not have an upper bound for counterfactual impact, but this does not mean it can be infinite. A normal distribution does not have a maximum value. It can take an arbitrarily large value. However, it cannot take an infinite value. Its range is the set of real numbers.
Thanks, Wladimir.
Here is a thought experiment that may be helpful. Imagine you had all the empirical/physical evidence about an animal, including all the "behavioural, physiological, neural, pharmacological, cognitive, evolutionary, and ecological evidence". There may be practical limits to how much one could know, but I am imagining a scenario where empirical/physical was fully eliminated. Would you be able to say whether the animal is sentient or not under the Welfare Footprint Framework (WFF)? If the probability of sentience is just supposed to capture empirical uncertainty under WFF, it would be either 0 or 1? For it to be higher than 0, and below 1, I think it would have to capture metaphysical or definitional uncertainty. If so, would it be better for WFF to cover just empirical uncertainty?
Under WFF, affective welfare either exists or does not exist at all. However, how can one justify such a binary distinction? Each type of empirical evidence, including "behavioural, physiological, neural, pharmacological, cognitive, evolutionary, and ecological evidence", exists on a spectrum. So I find it very counterintuitive that we could map empirical evidence to affective welfare either existing (sentience) or not existing at all (lack of sentience). I believe this would require assuming the existence of a sharp surface in the evidential space separating affective welfare existing from it not existing at all (even if there is uncertainty about the surface location), which is what feels arbitrary to me.
I would like to have the option of sorting the posts of a given user. As of now, I can only sort posts with a given tag.
Thanks. It is fixed.
I would prefer draft comments I deleted not to show up in my private homepage.
Hi Cynthia and Wladimir. Nice post.
You may be interested in the article "Ethics Without Sentience: Facing Up to the Probable Insignificance of Phenomenal Consciousness" by François Kammerer. Here is a summary. Relatedly, you may like this and this very short posts by Keith Frankish. I agree with Keith that phenomenal consciousness does not exist. In any case, even if it exists, I agree with François it is not significant. Phenomenal consciousness as traditionally defined is not falsifiable (or, to be precise, it is traditionally defined such that one can only know about their own consciousness at the moment). In practice, one always has to come up with empirical proxies for it, but I feel these are largely arbitrary if it is not falsifiable. So I believe it would be better to focus just on what animals can do (as in your affective-capacity analysis), and not on assessing phenomenal sentience.
When I click on a given section of a post on the left pane, the URL shown at the top is still that of the post. It used to be the URL of the section. However, I can still link to a section by opening it in a new tab.
I wonder if the power required by brains is proportional to the number of neurons across very different species. It seems to be so among mammals. From Herculano-Houzel (2011):
Hi Agnes. Thanks for the update.
Have you considered letting visitors to the EA Opportunities Board know about the boards from 80,000 Hours and Probably Good? To which extent did people who knew about these boards still wanted full time roles in the EA Opportunities Board? If to a significant extent, why?