LessWrong 2.0 Reader

From Rethink Priorities:

1. We used Monte Carlo simulations to estimate, for various sentience models and across eighteen organisms, the distribution of plausible probabilities of sentience.
2. 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).

It would be nice if you had the sexes of the siblings, since it's supposedly only the older brothers that count, though I don't really expect that to change anything. I wanted to do that but given the Ablaza et al. results where the effect exists for all older siblings, I decided it wasn't worth the drop in power. 

I think Greg Clark has stated his new book will claim none of the observed status-related birth order effects commonly cited actually exist in a dataset with sufficient size and resolution. 

Maybe my next substack post will be trying to analyze how the expose equilibrium changes as a function of the percent_gay parameter. 

Really enjoyed the post, but in the interest of rationality,

How many more older siblings should patrons of the Chelsea nightclub have than all other men in New York?

This question rests on the false premise(s) (i.e., model misspecification(s)) that homosexuality is only a function of birth order and that the Chelsea nightclub probability doesn't stem from heavy selection. Relatedly, gwern notes that, "surely homosexuality is not the primary trait the Catholic Church hierarchy is trying to select for." Maybe this was supposed to be more tongue-in-cheek. But identifying a cause does not require that it sufficiently explain something completely on its own.

… that wasn’t enough to learn the pattern, though. Shortly out of college, reality was still hitting me over the head; that time the big idea was an efficient implementation of universal competitively-optimal portfolios. I lost a couple thousand dollars on wildly over-leveraged forex positions.

I am curious what that idea was and where it went wrong. 

It doesn't look to me like non-surviving children are reported in this data, so no. 

However, the reported results doesn't change when you just look at it century by century.

As for the traits being selected, we obviously don't know, though the idea is that selecting for homosexuality gifts the selectors an obvious manner of control of whomever makes it into the college of cardinals.

I don't know what you have in mind there. If they're 80% gay, they can hardly threaten each other with exposure. At the most, the accusation would be a smokescreen, transparent to all the insiders, for those who already have the power to dispose of an enemy. Cf. the exclusion of Marine Le Pen from standing for President of France, on the grounds of an "embezzlement" which it appears that every party freely engages in.

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently what should not be done at all." - Peter Drucker

Sorry - fixed! They should match now - I'd forgotten to update the figure in this post. Thanks for pointing it.