Jemist's Shortform

J Bostock

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From Rethink Priorities:

We used Monte Carlo simulations to estimate, for various sentience models and across eighteen organisms, the distribution of plausible probabilities of sentience.
We used a similar simulation procedure to estimate the distribution of welfare ranges for eleven of these eighteen organisms, taking into account uncertainty in model choice, the presence of proxies relevant to welfare capacity, and the organisms’ probabilities of sentience (equating this probability with the probability of moral patienthood)

Now with the disclaimer that I do think that RP are doing good and important work and are one of the few organizations seriously thinking about animal welfare priorities...

Their epistemics led them to do a Monte Carlo simulation to determine if organisms are capable of suffering (and if so, how much) then got a value of 5 shrimp = 1 human and then not bat an eye at this number.

Neither a physicalist nor a functionalist theory of consciousness can reasonably justify a number like this. Shrimp have 5 orders of magnitude fewer neurons than humans, so whether suffering is the result of a physical process or an information processing one, this implies that shrimp neurons do 4 orders of magnitude more of this process per second than human neurons. The authors get around this by refusing to stake themselves on any theory of consciousness.

The overall structure of the RP welfare range report, does not cut to the truth, instead the core mental motion seems to be to engage with as many existing piece of work as possible; credence is doled out to different schools of thought and pieces of evidence in a way which seems more like appeasement, lip-service, or a "well these guys have done some work, who are we disrespect them by ignoring it" attitude. Removal of noise is one of the most important functions of meta-analysis, and it is largely absent.

The result of this is an epistemology where the accuracy of a piece of work is a monotonically increasing function of the number of sources, theories, and lines of argument. Which is fine if your desired output is a very long Google doc, and a disclaimer to yourself (and, more cynically, your funders) that "No no, we did everything right, we reviewed all the evidence and took it all into account." but it's pretty bad if you want to actually be correct.

I grow increasingly convinced that the epistemics of EA are not especially good, worsening, and already insufficient to work on the relatively low-stakes and easy issue of animal welfare (as compared to AI x-risk).

Can you elaborate how

all of the neurons in the brain are firing at once and doing computations in at the same time

leads to

the more neurons are computing some sort of suffering, the greater the intensity of suffering

5nielsrolf2y

One intuition against this is by drawing an analogy to LLMs: the residual stream represents many features. All neurons participate in the representation of a feature. But the difference between a larger and a smaller model is mostly that the larger model can represent more features, not that the larger model represents features with greater magnitude. In humans it seems to be the case that consciousness is most strongly connected to processes in the brain stem, rather than the neo cortex. Here is a great talk about the topic - the main points are (writing from memory, might not be entirely accurate): * humans can lose consciousness or produce intense emotions (good and bad) through interventions on a very small area of the brain stem. When other much larger parts of the brain are damaged or missing, humans continue to behave in a way such that one would ascribe emotions to them from interactions, for example, they show affection. * dopamin, serotonin, and other chemicals that alter consciousness work in the brain stem If we consider the question from an evolutionary angle, I'd also argue that emotions are more important when an organism has fewer alternatives (like a large brain that does fancy computations). Once better reasoning skills become available, it makes sense to reduce the impact that emotions have on behavior and instead trust the abstract reasoning. In my own experience, the intensity in which I feel emotions is strongly correlated to how action guiding it is, and I think as a child I felt emotions more intensly than now, which also fits the hypothesis that more ability to think abstract reduces intensity of emotions.

1Garrett Baker2y

This hardly seems an argument against the one in the shortform, namely [...] If the original authors never thought of this that seems on them.

Jemist's Shortform

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Jemist's Shortform

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