Thanks for the post, Carl.

• As funding expands in focused EA priority issues, eventually diminishing returns there will equalize with returns for broader political spending, and activity in the latter area could increase enormously: since broad political impact per dollar is flatter over a large range political spending should either be a very small or very large portion of EA activity

Great point.

Hi Linch. I am open to bets against short AI timelines, or what they supposedly imply, up to 10 k$. Do you see any that we could make that is good for both of us under our own views considering we could invest our money, and that you could take loans?

Hi Ajeya. I am open to bets against short AI timelines, or what they supposedly imply, up to 10 k$. Do you see any that we could make that is good for both of us under our own views considering we could invest our money, and that you could take loans?

Agreed, David.

instead believe only humans and animals experiencing well-being is good

Nitpick. I would say humans, animals, microorganisms, and digital beings.

Thanks for sharing, Brendan. You may want to try RoastMyPost, and then share any feedback you may have with @Ozzie Gooen.

Thanks for the post, Joey.

Doing neglectedness right

“Considering the main two areas I am considering, food systems climate is more neglected than clean energy climate.”

I think this sort of comparison makes a lot of sense. It is trying to look at the real oppperuntiy cost of what else would be supported by people (or yourself) considering the area. [...]

I think you are suggesting people say i) "X is more neglected than Y" if ii) "X is more cost-effective than Y at the margin". I believe it would be better for people to simply say ii) as applied to the relevant context. For example, that funding X with 10 k$ would save more lives than funding Y by the same amount. As you pointed out, i) could be interpreted in many different ways, and therefore can lead to misunderstandings.

I think a decent proxy for neglect is: what is the group right on the edge?

This is very unclear to me. For individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to "individual number of neurons"^"exponent", and a range of 0.5 to 1.5 for "exponent", which I believe covers reasonable best guesses, I estimate that the Shrimp Welfare Project’s (SWP’s) Humane Slaughter Initiative (HSI) has increased the welfare of shrimps via increasing the adoption of electrical stunning 0.00167 (= 2.06*10^-5/0.0123) to 1.67 k (= 20.6/0.0123) times as cost-effectively as GiveWell's top charities increase the welfare of humans. So I can easily see HSI increasing the welfare of shrimps much more or less cost-effectively than GiveWell's top charities increase the welfare of humans.

Thanks for the post, Tristan. I am pessimistic about finding interventions that robustly increase welfare (in expectation) accounting for soil animals and microorganisms. I do not think electrically stunnning qualifies, although it decreases intense pain experienced by the target beneficiaries, and the ratio between effects on target beneficiaries and other organisms is much smaller than for the vast majority of interventions. 

TL;DR: Almost all suffering in the world today is experienced by wild animals

This is unclear to me. I estimated the above is not the case for individual welfare per fully-healthy-animal-year proportional to "individual number of neurons"^"exponent", and "exponent" = 1.5, which is the upper bound of the range of 0.5 to 1.5 that I guess covers reasonable best guesses. For that exponent, I calculate the absolute value of the total welfare of wild birds, mammals, and finfishes is 4.12 % of the total welfare of humans, and that the absolute value of the total welfare of soil ants, termites, springtails, mites, and nematodes is 1.89 % of the total welfare of humans.

The bet is neutral for both parties if the Metaculus' question resolves ambiguously. In this case, no transfer of money would happen. A higher probability of the question resolving ambiguously decreases the expected value of the bet for both parties, but this could be mitigated by increasing the potential benefits.

My bet does not depend on Metaculus' definition of "weak AGI". I rely on Metaculus' definition of SAI given in a question about the time from "weak AGI" until SAI. However, the bet I suggested is just about the date of SAI.

I share some thoughts below. I still have very little confidence in my modelling of the individual welfare per fully-healthy-organism-year. However, I think this strengthens my redommendation of decreasing the uncertainty about how the individual welfare per unit time of different organisms and digital systems compares with that of humans.

Do you have an underlying causal model for why BMR^Exp1 and IW/FHAY could be generally correlated beyond being correlated through the indirect connection BMR^Exp2 ∝ Neuron Count and NC^Exp2 ∝ Welfare ?

Producing welfare requires energy, and the output of a Cobb–Douglas production function, which is typically used in economics, is proportional to "input 1"^"exponent 1"*"input 2"^"exponent 2"*...*"input N"^"exponent N". A greater energy consumption also means more room to process information, and I think this is necessary to produce welfare.

Nitpick. The exponents in the last sentence above should be different.

Do you have theories of consciousness that could give a model for how organisms without neurons could have hedonic experiences? 

Here are Gemini's 10 most credible theories of consciousness that do not require biological neurons, and 10 most credible that predict bacteria have a probability of consciousness above exactly 0.

Naively I would assume that the correlation between BMR^Exp1 and IW/FHAY is completely explained through the connection through the neuron count variable and extending the model to organisms without neurons would be fallacious. 

You may well be right. Yet, I believe my recommendation stands even if one is certain that all organism without biological neurons have an expected welfare per unit time of exactly 0.