Hi Nick.

What kind of research do you think could decrease uncertainty about their sentience?

The kind of research described in this section of the article. Tasks involving working memory, aspects of operant conditioning, self-report of sensation, or higher order consciousness (like the “mirror test with biting parasite”, which offers stronger evidence for sentience than the standard mirror test). Below is some context from the article about why these tasks are promising. I bolded the 4 types of tasks.

here we suggest four types of candidate measure that seem particularly promising as indicators of sentience. One concerns working memory, and another, forms of operant conditioning: two types of ability that S.P.U.D. subjects seem not to convincingly have. A third type of candidate measure concerns self report. As we saw in the section Red Herrings: Responses That Do Not Require Sentience, unaware humans, and also monkeys with blindsight, report sensing nothing (thence having no P-consciousness), even when presented with stimuli that elicit other kinds of response – with the human subjects consistently describing themselves as merely guessing. Finally, higher order cognitive processes such as episodic memory and self-recognition, can yield insights into animal awareness. These have not been studied in S.P.U.D. subjects, and this would likely be impossible, but are arguably reliant on perceptual consciousness. We review each of these below, and also outline how they could be modified to now address questions about sentience: the ethically relevant dimension of P-consciousness at the heart of the fish pain debate. We also suggest how their validity as indicators of sentience could be assessed.

In addition, tasks involving endogenous/voluntary attention, like Posner’s spatial cueing task, as discussed in Nieder (2022).

I'm assuming you mean behavioural research?

All of the above tasks look into behaviour. However, passing them would be stronger evidence for sentience than passing tasks that have been passed by SPUDs (spines disconnected from brains, humans in unaware states, decerebrate mammals and birds, or organisms lacking a nervous system like plants and protozoa).

I think this kind of research is helpful to reduce uncertainty but doesn't necessarily address fundamental questions about how brains work.

Note that research looking for the neural correlates of consciosness (NCCs) in animals relies on studying the behaviour of humans. In particular, to understand which states of the human brain are responsible for consciousness. Nieder (2022) says there is no evidence for the neural correlates of consciousness in animals besides mammals and birds.

I'm just saying that if you're not a longtermist, you don't face as much uncertainty about how to achieve good outcomes

Makes sense.

Not sure what you're asking exactly

You seem to suggest that longterm effects may not be relevant for global health interventions while being relevant for AI safety interventions (or others which are typically referred to as longtermist interventions). I meant to question this. If I thought longterm effects were relevant for AI safety interventions (I do not), I would think they would be relevant for global health interventions too.

I think the other lists have value, but are more more observational heuristics that might explain many micro issues, but not really help you make sense of the world and how things work overall.

I agree.

Hi Elias.

We face a lot of uncertainty about the sign of our impact.

Therefore, we should be very vigilant about our epistemics to make sure that we are not having a negative impact in expectation.

But trying hard deeply distorts our epistemics - it makes us more prone to motivated reasoning about what we’re doing, and leaves us with less slack to reflect on it.

Great point.

Crucially, this argument applies much more strongly to people working in “longtermist areas” - which other critiques of trying hard generally don’t do. For example, global health EAs whose terminal value is short-term welfare also face uncertainty about the impact of their actions - but much less (especially about the sign) than people trying to improve the long-term future.

If interventions decreasing the risk of large catastrophes mostly affected the longterm future, why would the same not apply to global health interventions?

Interventions with negligible longterm effects could still decrease welfare due to effects on soil invertebrates?

Hi Matt. Nice initiative.

Do people come away understanding these 200 concepts well?

Here are some related lists.

Hi Peter.

TL;DR: We ran a Delphi study with 272 international AI experts to prioritize 24 AI risk domains from the MIT AI Risk Domain Taxonomy.

I wonder how much the probabilities would change if they were about all sources of risk instead of just AI. If they would not change much, could it be that AI has not increased the risks, but simply became associated with all risks because it is in the process of being integrated into practically everything that is relevant for assessing the risks you covered?

Hello.

Based on everything you've looked into, what odds do you put on fish sentience?

I speculate carp have around 50 % (= (0.70 + 0.40)/2) chance of being sentient, but I have little reason to expect my intuitions are calibrated. I feel like anything from 0.1 % to 90 % is reasonable. In any case, I can see the welfare of fish being very close to 0 even if they are sentient. So I would rather prioritise decreasing uncertainty about their sentience and intensity of their experiences over investing in interventions helping fish.

Here is some additional context you may be interested in about the likelihood of fish being sentient. Bob Fischer's book about comparing welfare across species presents an estimate of 70 % for the sentience of carp. Among the people surveyed in Zipple et al. (2024), around 40 % guessed "most" or "all or nearly all" fish are conscious (which is necessary, but not sufficient for sentience), as illustrated in Figure 1 below.

I would add, I'm not convinced that all "unconscious" states in humans are equal. I've heard reports of people who "wake up" during surgery, but were still unable to move.

Anesthesia awareness is a real (though rare) phenomenon. However, note that people who are awake would no longer qualify as unconscious under the definition of the article.

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.