Have you considered accounting for effects on soil invertebrates? One of the "key takeaways" from your work on risk aversion was that "Spending on corporate cage-free campaigns for egg-laying hens is robustly[8] cost-effective under nearly all reasonable types and levels of risk aversion considered here". However, I think such campaigns can easily increase or decrease animal welfare accounting for effects on soil ants and termites. I suspect they perform worse than inaction under moderate levels of any type of risk aversion you considered (“avoiding the worst” risk aversion, difference-making risk aversion, and ambiguity aversion).

we aim to include more topics (which could include “meta” work and research) in future iterations of the model

Good to know.

Hi Nick. I agree it is important that the questions are easy to answer. However, I would say there are simple ways of letting users express their uncertainty. For the question about how much animal welfare should factor into funding decisions, there could be an option saying something like "I am very uncertain about which of the 4 views above I should pick", or users could be allowed to give weights to each of the 4 views (instead of giving a weight of 1 to a single view). Then these answers could be used to define distributions for the probability of sentience, and welfare range conditional on sentience. Wider distributions would tend to result in a higher expected value of perfect information.

Thanks for the links, Laura. To clarify, I meant to ask whether you have considered making recommendations that specifically target decreasing the key uncertainties that matter for cross-cause prioritisation. For example, decreasing uncertainty about welfare comparisons across species by supporting work like RP's moral weight project.

Thanks for your work on this.

• We modeled key uncertainties that matter for cross-cause prioritization: moral weights, time discounting, risk attitudes, aggregation across ethical views, AI-related uncertainty, and empirical uncertainty within each giving opportunity.

Have you considered making recommendations for people who do not have definitive views about the topics above? For example, question 1 of the Donor Compass asks about how much animal welfare whould factor into funding decisions, as illustrated below. I understand each option is represented by a set of point estimates describing welfare comparisons across species, but I do not undorse any particular set. I can see reasonable best guesses ranging from "Only humans matter [in practice]" to "Animals matter, but somewhat less than humans". So I think the priority should be decreasing uncertainty instead of acting based on a given set of best guesses.

Hi TFD. Great points.

Maybe? I personally would be much more discouraged from posting by a public comment than a private message. However it'd be nice if we could have a live log somewhere where forum users could see that we dm'd an anonymous user.

Yes, I can see many people preferring a private message. One could ask people whether they would be fine with the private message being made public.

I also think public messages are more valuable when the moderation is more contentious, and this makes them less embarrassing because it will be less clear that people did something wrong.

I can see both general guidance and specific examples about how to improve comments being useful. I believe they are often more effective together.

I appreciate being able to send someone a more casual message for butting up against guidelines rather than having to call them out publicly (which is a far more embarassing result of what can be a fairly minor infraction).

I feel like it should often be possible to give guidance to someone in public without embarassing them. One could explicitly say the infraction is minor, and use a casual tone. Public moderation may help reinforce good discussion norms in addition to increasing transparency.

One section from that post raises the concept of 'Asymmetric effort ratios'. This is definitely part of our moderation decision. At one point, if I remember correctly, you wrote almost a fifth of the words on the Forum in a week. You are very productive of long comments, which are often packed with difficult to dispel misunderstandings. This is part of why a rate-limit was the solution we arrived at. In small doses, you can be a valuable contributor, but without limit, it becomes unfairly taxing on your interlocutors.

I do not think the number of comments people can write should be greatly limited due to them having written long comments (supposedly) packed with difficult to dispel misunderstandings (I am not saying this applies to Yarrow or not; I do not know which comments you have in mind). Readers can lightly or strongly downvote comments they do not find useful, disagree with them, and point out clear mistake. What is a difficult to dispel misunderstanding is quite subjective. So effective moderation here seems difficult to me.

When writing a lot is the problem (I personally do not think this can by itself be a problem), it would be better for the rate limit to be defined in terms of words per week instead of number of comments per week? Alternatively, there could be a limit for the number of words, and a less strict limit for the number of comments.

Hi Sasha. I have only made such bets with Greg Colbourn and David Manheim. I have proposed similar bets many times. People with short timelines usually say they had better take a loan from a bank, which is fair. They do not expect to pay it fully due to a global catastrophe, or expect to pay part of it super easily due to extreme abundance. On the other hand, I suspect many of them have not taken loans up to the point of marginal borrowed money being neutral (instead of beneficial) under their views about AI.

Thanks for sharing, Bob. I think this research is valuable.

What are your thoughts on the pen and paper argument against computational functionalism (CF)? I am open to consciousness being possible in non-biological systems, but I reject CF. I do not see how any set of AND, OR, and NOT operations could itself be conscious (even if implemented with pen and paper). Digital computers are implementations of these operations. So I do not think they can be conscious.