The field is interested in looking more closely at valence independently of consciousness

Could you link the most relevant piece you are aware of? What do you mean by "independently"? Under hedonism, I think the probability of consciousness only matters to the extent it informs the probability of valences experiences.

you could at least confirm that AIs don't have valenced experience

Interesting! How?

Independently, we're also very interested in how to capture the difference between positive and negative experiences in alien sorts of minds. It is often taken for granted based on human experience, but it isn't trivial to say what it is.

Makes sense. Without that, it would be very hard to improve digital welfare.

Thanks for this great project! Do you also plan to estimate the welfare range conditional on consciousness, or the probability of positive or negative experiences conditional on consciousness?

If you do not put physical barriers, fish would move across different properties, making overfishing profitable anyway. It is like two "private" oil fields over the same oil reservoir.

Profitable for who? I am thinking companies owning some waters would charge fishing companies proportionally to how much they capture in their waters. Overfishing would eventually lead to no fish being captured in their areas, and therefore no revenue from fishing.

It is the canonical case for an immediate Pigovian tax: the externality is global, uniform, circulates in the atomosfere...  Regarding imports, you can charge a carbon tariff.

The increase in the death from non-optimal temperature is not uniform.

Thanks, Arturo.

I find this criticism not so good in general, because there are many externalities and "measuring" them means nothing. To some extent an externality is simply "what the market does not measure for us", so Pigovianism is more a framework than a theory.

Right, quantifying the externalities is challenging. Privatisation of public goods makes the market measure more for us. Instead of setting up regulations to prevent overfishing, the oceans could be privatised, and then the companies owning them would have an incentive to prevent the collapse of fish stocks (otherwise, they would go out of fish, and therefore would no longer be able to charge fishing companies).

On the other hand, the lack of Pigovian taxes on carbon (the canonical case where the framework is almost a theory by itself) and the incredible roundabouts to avoid the simple and well known solution proves the utter disgrace that are our social systems.

I think global warming may well be beneficial in many regions. However, at least for countries wanting to decrease it, I suppose taxing CO2eq would make sense. One challenge is that people with lower income may spend relatively more on energy, so they would be relatively more affected by the higher energy prices resulting from taxing CO2eq, altghough this could be mitigated by disproportionally directing the tax revenue to such people. Another challenge is that countries taxing CO2eq would start importing more energy from countries that do not tax it.

Love it.

Thanks for the post!

Conditional on metastability, the mean credence that vacuum decay is inducible with arbitrarily advanced technology was 19%, with a slim majority finding its likelihood negligible, but a substantial minority asserting high likelihood.

For context, the expected lifetime of the universe based on the natural rate of vacuum decay is estimated to be 10^790 years.

Thanks for the post, Tyler!

There are a lot of ways to arrange 86 billion neurons. You could give them to one human, to 430 rats, or to 86 billion nematodes.

The above implies nematodes have 1 neuron, but they have around 300 neurons. So 86 billion neurons correspond to around 300 M nematodes.

For classical utilitarians, “hedonium” is likely many orders of magnitude more valuable than human brains (or the equivalent instantiated in silico).

I estimated the welfare range per calorie consumption of bees is 4.88 k times that of humans, which suggests bees produce welfare 4.88 k times as efficiently if welfare is proportional to the welfare range.

Hi Tom,

It depends on the organisations which would receive the additional donations. If the person quitting their job donates 10 % of their gross annual salary to an organisation 10 times as cost-effective as their initial organisation, their donations doubled as a result of quitting, there was no impact from direct work in the new organisation, and they were not replaced in their original organisation, their annual impact after quitting would become 1.82 (= (0 + 0.1*10*2)/(0.1 + 0.1*10)) times as large as their initial annual impact.

Thanks, Bob! Based on that, my understanding is that the welfare ranges refer to differences between the welfare per unit time of the best and worst moments that could be realistically experieced (that are "realistic biological possibilities"). 

What is the period of time to which "most intense" refers to? Any period of time, or the typical lifespan of the species? If the former, the welfare ranges practically refer to the intensities of very short experiences (for example, the worst possible second is worse than a random second of the worst possible minute).