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).
Hello Jen. Nice post. Where could one look for opportunities to live with impact- or rationality-focussed people in San Francisco? I know there is the Facebook group Bay Area EA/Rationality Housing Board.
Hi Laura. That finding also jumped out to me. I suspect orgs are less willing to improve MEL than suggested by that quote. "77% [of orgs] say funders rarely or never fund MEL (excl. n/a results)", but I assume this refer to funding restricted to MEL, whereas what I think matters to assess orgs' preferences is whether there are funds which can be used to improve MEL. I would be surprised if funders restricted funding to non-MEL activities. So I believe orgs could spend more on MEL if they wanted to.
"75% of organizations say improving MEL is important or urgent", but I find it difficult to interpret this without knowing what orgs would say about other activities. Maybe the vast majority of orgs considers more important or urgent improving other activities, which could explain why "only 18% would definitely pay for it".
Also, in regards to Bob's book, it seems like it would make sense, rather than adding the model's estimates together to instead act on each model separately, i.e. assigning 5% of resources to help animals according to the equality model, 25% according to the neurophysiological model, and 70% according to the proxies model. Then, within the 70% for the proxies model, we could assign 33% of resources to applying a high exponent to the welfare ranges, 33% to applying no exponent to the welfare ranges, and 33% to applying a low exponent to the welfare ranges.
Something like this is proposed in the article "Moral Uncertainty, Proportionality and Bargaining".
Only physical consciousness is falsifiable? I think so. So I believe it is better to focus on physicalist theories of consciousness. Relatedly, you may be interested in this discussion between me and Wladimir Alonso from the Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI) about whether sentience is binary.
I mentioned before that IRT is basically an Elo for the game of responding correctly to benchmark questions. For Elo, here’s the win probability of player A vs. player B, given respective strengths Sa and Sb:
P(A wins) = 1 / [1 + 10^((Sb - Sa)/400)]
Nitpick. I think the above is the probability of winning plus half of the probability of drawing.
I broadly agree with the points you made in that comment.
You may be interested in myestimates of the total welfare of various organism populations assuming welfare per fully-happy-animal-year is a power law of the individual number of neurons, or of the basal metabolic rate (BMR) at 25 ºC. Here is some context about why a power lay may be appropriate.
Hi Aidan and Aaron. Great news. The program sounds very promising.
Meanwhile, the animal movement needs more new interventions and organizations in the pipeline so that efforts to fix factory farming can scale in the coming years.
I like that you say "fix" instead of "end" factory farming. Fixing it is more aligned with increasing animal welfare, as there is large uncertainty about which animals have positive or negative lives (worth living or not from their own perspective).
Hi Rafael. You are welcome. Thanks for the great post.
Hello Jen. Nice post. Where could one look for opportunities to live with impact- or rationality-focussed people in San Francisco? I know there is the Facebook group Bay Area EA/Rationality Housing Board.
Hi Jim. Great post. I share your concerns.
Unless any operationalisation of sentience is arbitrary?
Hi Kieran. Welcome to the EA Forum. That matches my read.
Hi Laura. That finding also jumped out to me. I suspect orgs are less willing to improve MEL than suggested by that quote. "77% [of orgs] say funders rarely or never fund MEL (excl. n/a results)", but I assume this refer to funding restricted to MEL, whereas what I think matters to assess orgs' preferences is whether there are funds which can be used to improve MEL. I would be surprised if funders restricted funding to non-MEL activities. So I believe orgs could spend more on MEL if they wanted to.
"75% of organizations say improving MEL is important or urgent", but I find it difficult to interpret this without knowing what orgs would say about other activities. Maybe the vast majority of orgs considers more important or urgent improving other activities, which could explain why "only 18% would definitely pay for it".
Something like this is proposed in the article "Moral Uncertainty, Proportionality and Bargaining".
Only physical consciousness is falsifiable? I think so. So I believe it is better to focus on physicalist theories of consciousness. Relatedly, you may be interested in this discussion between me and Wladimir Alonso from the Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI) about whether sentience is binary.
Hi Gregory. Great post.
Nitpick. I think the above is the probability of winning plus half of the probability of drawing.
I broadly agree with the points you made in that comment.
You may be interested in my estimates of the total welfare of various organism populations assuming welfare per fully-happy-animal-year is a power law of the individual number of neurons, or of the basal metabolic rate (BMR) at 25 ºC. Here is some context about why a power lay may be appropriate.
Hi Aidan and Aaron. Great news. The program sounds very promising.
I like that you say "fix" instead of "end" factory farming. Fixing it is more aligned with increasing animal welfare, as there is large uncertainty about which animals have positive or negative lives (worth living or not from their own perspective).