I’m working on impact markets – markets to trade nonexcludable goods. (My profile.)
I have a conversation menu and a Calendly for you to pick from!
If you’re also interested in less directly optimific things – such as climbing around and on top of boulders or amateurish musings on psychology – then you may enjoy some of the posts I don’t cross-post from my blog, Impartial Priorities.
Pronouns: Ideally she or they. I also still go by Denis and Telofy in various venues.
GoodX needs: advisors/collaborators for marketing, and funding. The funding can be for our operation or for retro funding of other impactful projects on our impact markets. We're a PBC and seek SAFE investments over donations.
I’m happy to do calls, give feedback, or go bouldering together, also virtually. You can book me on Calendly.
Hiii! I found this list of “Crucial questions for longtermists” to be quite impressive. It is also listed as part of “A central directory for open research questions,” which is broader than your question.
I met Marisa at EAG London in 2019. We had approximately weekly calls afterwards during the lockdown that I greatly enjoyed. That and all the virtual events helped me connect with the rest of the EA world – probably more so than in-person events. Sadly, I missed one of our calls, which prompted me to set up a comprehensive reminder solution that I use to this day.
When we supported each other again in the context of some job applications a few years later, I learned that she had just survived a very difficult phase of her life. Then, as now, I wish I had known and had been able to support her in some fashion.
When you lose hope in humanity and x-risk reduction seems pointless, she’s the sort of existence proof that keeps you going.
I love this research! Thank you so much for doing it!
My gut reaction to the results is that it's odd that humans are so high up in terms of their capacity for welfare. Just as an uninformative prior, I would've expected us to be somewhere in the middle. Less confidently, I would've expected a similar number of orders of magnitude deviation from the human baseline in either direction, within reason. E.g. +/- ~.5 OOM.
Plus, we are humans, so there's a risk that we're biased in our favor. It could be simply a bias from our ability to emphasize with other humans. But it could also be the case that there are countless more markers of sentience that humans don't have (but many other sentient animals do) that we are prone to overlook.
Have you investigated what the sources of this effect might be? There might be any number of biases at work as I mentioned, but perhaps our lives have become so comfy most of the time that we perceive slight problems very strongly (e.g., a disapproving gaze). If then something really bad happens, it feels enormously bad?
(I've in the past explicitly assumed that most beings with a few (million) neurons have a roughly human capacity for welfare – not because I thought that was likely but because I couldn't tell in which direction it was off. Do you maybe already have a defense of the results for people like me?)
In any case, I'll probably just adopt your results into my thinking now. I don't expect them to change my priorities much given all the other factors.
Thank you again! <3
Update: When I mentioned this to a friend on a hike, I came up with two ways in which the criteria might be amended to include nonhuman ones: (1) In may cases, we probably have a theory for why a particular behavior or feature is likely to be indicative of conscious experience. Understanding this mechanism, we can look for other systems that might implement the same mechanism, sort of how the eyes of humans, eagles, and flies are very different but we infer that they are probably all for the purpose of vision. (2) Maybe a number of animals that show certain known criteria for consciousness also share suspiciously consistently some other features. One could then investigate whether these features are also indicative of consciousness and whether there are other animals that have these new features at the expense of the older, known ones. (The analysis could cluster features that usually co-occur to not overweight causally related features in cases where many of them are observable.)
We have sympathies towards both movements, and consider ourselves to take the middle path. We race forward and accelerate as quickly as possible while mentioning safety.
Mentioning safety is a waste of resources that you could direct toward attaching propulsion to asteroids to get them here faster.
In fact, asteroids will inevitably hit earth earlier or later, and if they kill humanity, clearly they are superior to humanity. The true masters of our future lightcone are the asteroids. That which can be destroyed by asteroids ought to be destroyed by asteroids.
True progress is in speeding the inevitable. Resistance is futile.
This post is also a great info hazard. It risks causing impostors with sub-146 IQs (2009 LW survey) to feel adequate!
That's a good point. Time discounting (a “time premium” for the past) has also made me very concerned about the welfare of Boltzmann brains in the first moments after the Big Bang. It might seem intractable to still improve their welfare, but if there is any nonzero chance, the EV will be overwhelming!
But I also see the value in longtermism because if these Boltzmann brains had positive welfare, it'll be even more phenomenally positive from the vantage points of our descendants millions of years from now!
My current practical ethics
The question often comes up how we should make decisions under epistemic uncertainty and normative diversity of opinion. Since I need to make such decisions every day, I had to develop a personal system, however inchoative, to assist me.
A concrete (or granite) pyramid
My personal system can be thought of like a pyramid.
The ground floor
The ground floor of principles and heuristics is really the most interesting part for anyone who has to act in the world, so I won't further explain the top two floors.
The principles and heuristics should be expected to be messy. That is, I think, because they are by necessity the result of an intersubjective process of negotiation and moral trade (positive-sum compromise) with all the other agents and their preferences. (This should probably include acausal moral trades like Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds.)
It should also be expected to be messy because these principles and heuristics have to satisfy all sorts of awkward criteria:
Three types of freedom
But really that leaves us still a lot of freedom (for better or worse):
These suggest a particular stance toward other activists:
Very few examples
In my experience, principles and heuristics are best identified by chatting with friends and generalizing from their various intuitions.
Various non-consequentialist ethical theories can come in handy here to generate further useful principles and heuristics. That is probably because they are attempts at generalizing from the intuitions of certain authors, which puts them almost on par (to the extent to which these authors are relateable to you) with generalizations from the intuitions of your friends.
(If you find my writing style hard to read, you can ask Claude to rephrase the message into a style that works for you.)