I’d argue that many donors are surprisingly diversified given direct application of philosophical theory, yes.

I agree.

I’d say the ultimate decision makers are donors, not eg evaluators.

I agree in the sense the money influenced by grantmakers and evaluators ultimately comes from donors. However, are you suggesting grantmakers and evaluators diversify their grants and recommendations in significant part to appeal to donors? I agree to some extent, and it makes sense for grantmakers and evaluators to do it up to a point such that they can influence more funds. Them having a very narrow portfolio would tend to attract less funds.

Other than argue about it, probably not much, assuming functionalism and materialism/physicalism of some kind that's compatible with artificial sentience.

You may be interested in the article A science of chimeras? The implications of illusionism for non-human consciousness research. The abstract is below.

Illusionism states that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, even though it seems to exist. While illusionism is controversial, it is a serious contender among theories of consciousness. We argue that it has substantial and non-trivial implications for non-human consciousness research (NHCR), particularly for the study of the distribution of phenomenal consciousness across beings. If illusionism is true, NHCR can be pursued if conceptualized as investigating the distribution of quasi-phenomenal consciousness, i.e. the states which are misrepresented as phenomenally conscious in humans. However, we argue that knowing the distribution of quasi-phenomenal consciousness is not highly informative. For this reason, illusionism suggests that some approaches to NHCR should be preferred over others. Approaches which focus on features that provide valuable information about non-human cognition independently of their supposed relation to consciousness retain much of their value if illusionism is true. We propose a “zombie test” and five specific heuristics to help identifying such features. Consequently, empirical researchers who take illusionism seriously gain a reason to prioritize some methodological approaches over others.

Hi Simon. In that case, how do you explain that impact-focussed grantmakers support many interventions, even within a single area (see, for example, the Animal Welfare Fund)? If the cost-effectiveness of each did not meaningfully decrease with spending, one would expect them to focus on much fewer grants?

Hi Ollie. I can no longer remove tags in my draft or published posts.

I remain sceptical of computational functionalism (CF). It implies some sets of AND, OR, and NOT operations lead to consciousness even if run at the rate of one operation every billion years, which seems very implausible to me.

Thanks, Jan. Yes, I was looking into an older version of the form.

Here is a post elaborating on why I think expanding agricultural land may increase or decrease the welfare/suffering/happiness of soil invertebrates.

No worries. Thanks for fixing it. The text looks good now.

Thanks for the relevant nuance, @GV 🔸. The 2026 multiplier would ideally account for the donations of pledges made after 2026 as a result of work in 2026, but this may be difficult to model. It will probably be easier in the future when there is more data on how "top-of-funnel" work translates into future pledges.

Hi Ollie. Thanks for the update.

I updated the last sentence of this comment, and some of its text went out of format. I am sharing a print below because I cannot copy the text which is out of format.