Podcast appearances and mentions of Bob Fischer

What if there's something it's like to be a shrimp — or a chatbot?For centuries, humans have debated the nature of consciousness, often placing ourselves at the very top. But what about the minds of others — both the animals we share this planet with and the artificial intelligences we're creating?We've pulled together clips from past conversations with researchers and philosophers who've spent years trying to make sense of animal consciousness, artificial sentience, and moral consideration under deep uncertainty.Links to learn more and full transcript: https://80k.info/nhsChapters:Cold open (00:00:00)Luisa's intro (00:00:57)Robert Long on what we should picture when we think about artificial sentience (00:02:49)Jeff Sebo on what the threshold is for AI systems meriting moral consideration (00:07:22)Meghan Barrett on the evolutionary argument for insect sentience (00:11:24)Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on whether there's something it's like to be a shrimp (00:15:09)Jonathan Birch on the cautionary tale of newborn pain (00:21:53)David Chalmers on why artificial consciousness is possible (00:26:12)Holden Karnofsky on how we'll see digital people as... people (00:32:18)Jeff Sebo on grappling with our biases and ignorance when thinking about sentience (00:38:59)Bob Fischer on how to think about the moral weight of a chicken (00:49:37)Cameron Meyer Shorb on the range of suffering in wild animals (01:01:41)Sébastien Moro on whether fish are conscious or sentient (01:11:17)David Chalmers on when to start worrying about artificial consciousness (01:16:36)Robert Long on how we might stumble into causing AI systems enormous suffering (01:21:04)Jonathan Birch on how we might accidentally create artificial sentience (01:26:13)Anil Seth on which parts of the brain are required for consciousness (01:32:33)Peter Godfrey-Smith on uploads of ourselves (01:44:47)Jonathan Birch on treading lightly around the “edge cases” of sentience (02:00:12)Meghan Barrett on whether brain size and sentience are related (02:05:25)Lewis Bollard on how animal advocacy has changed in response to sentience studies (02:12:01)Bob Fischer on using proxies to determine sentience (02:22:27)Cameron Meyer Shorb on how we can practically study wild animals' subjective experiences (02:26:28)Jeff Sebo on the problem of false positives in assessing artificial sentience (02:33:16)Stuart Russell on the moral rights of AIs (02:38:31)Buck Shlegeris on whether AI control strategies make humans the bad guys (02:41:50)Meghan Barrett on why she can't be totally confident about insect sentience (02:47:12)Bob Fischer on what surprised him most about the findings of the Moral Weight Project (02:58:30)Jeff Sebo on why we're likely to sleepwalk into causing massive amounts of suffering in AI systems (03:02:46)Will MacAskill on the rights of future digital beings (03:05:29)Carl Shulman on sharing the world with digital minds (03:19:25)Luisa's outro (03:33:43)Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic ArmstrongAdditional content editing: Katy Moore and Milo McGuireTranscriptions and web: Katy Moore

Or on the types of prioritization, their strengths, pitfalls, and how EA should balance them The cause prioritization landscape in EA is changing. Prominent groups have shut down, others have been founded, and everyone is trying to figure out how to prepare for AI. This is the first in a series of posts examining the state of cause prioritization and proposing strategies for moving forward. Executive Summary Performing prioritization work has been one of the main tasks, and arguably achievements, of EA. We highlight three types of prioritization: Cause Prioritization, Within-Cause (Intervention) Prioritization, and Cross-Cause (Intervention) Prioritization. We ask how much of EA prioritization work falls in each of these categories: Our estimates suggest that, for the organizations we investigated, the current split is 89% within-cause work, 2% cross-cause, and 9% cause prioritization. We then explore strengths and potential pitfalls of each level: Cause [...] ---Outline:(00:37) Executive Summary(03:09) Introduction: Why prioritize? Have we got it right?(05:18) The types of prioritization(06:54) A snapshot of EA(16:45) The Types of Prioritization Evaluated(16:57) Cause Prioritization(20:56) Within-Cause Prioritization(25:12) Cross-Cause Prioritization(30:07) Summary Table(30:53) What factors should push us towards one or another?(37:27) Possible Next Steps(39:44) Conclusion(40:58) Acknowledgements(41:01) en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Modern geometric logo design with text RETHINK PRIORITIES(41:55) Appendix: Strengths and Pitfalls of Each Type(42:07) Within-Cause Prioritization Strengths(42:12) Decision-Making Support(42:37) Comparability of Outputs(44:18) Disciplinarity Advantages(45:45) Responsiveness to Evidence(46:48) Movement Building(48:06) Within-Cause Prioritization Weaknesses and Potential Pitfalls(48:12) Responsiveness to Evidence(50:54) Decision-Making Support(52:45) Cross-Cause Prioritization Strengths:(53:06) Decision-Making Support(54:49) Responsiveness to Evidence(56:08) Movement Building(56:22) Comparability of Outputs(56:45) Decision-Making Support(57:14) Cross-Cause Prioritization Weaknesses and Potential Pitfalls(57:20) Comparability of Outputs(58:01) Disciplinarity Advantages(58:41) Movement Building(59:09) Decision-Making Support(01:00:27) Cause Prioritization Strengths(01:00:32) Decision-Making Support(01:02:01) Responsiveness to Evidence(01:02:52) Movement Building(01:03:28) Cause Prioritization Weaknesses and Potential Pitfalls(01:04:28) Decision-Making Support(01:06:08) Responsiveness to EvidenceThe original text contained 23 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 16th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZPdZv8sHuYndD8xhJ/doing-prioritization-better-2 --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

This week we are joined by member of the Scarred For Life Family - Bob Fischer. Bob is a broadcaster, writer and performer. He regularly writes for The Fortean Times in his column The Haunted Generation, as well as hosting the live Scarred For Life theatre shows. Based on the hugely successful Scarred for Life books, this is a weekly exploration of the things that scared people growing up and what those things say about us today.Join Andy Bush and co-authors Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence as, each week, they talk to a special guest who brings with them three terrors from their childhoods.Follow us on socials:Andy Bush - Twitter / InstagramScarred For Life - Twitter / Facebook / InstagramProduction Company - Lock It In StudioProducer - Dane Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Philosopher and researcher Bob Fischer joins us to explore the fascinating and complex world of insect consciousness. From fruit flies being used as depression models to bees playing with marbles, discover how new science is challenging everything we thought we knew about sentience. Through candid discussion about the scale of insect farming, the evidence for insect consciousness, and the practical implications…

Tim Worthington has a new book out called The Golden Age Of Children's TV - all about the best, worst and most just plain baffling shows you grew up with in the sixties, seventies and eighties - and the lines are open now for an hour of fun, facts, laughs and thrills. Bibi Lynch is waiting at the Why Bird Stop to join us on board the Playbus. Rose Ruane will be bringing along some alliterative bits and pieces and telling us all about Bric-A-Brac. Anna Cale is joining us to keep us up to date with the latest headlines direct from the Junior Gazette in Press Gang. Vikki Gregorich will be dropping by to introduce a new animated adventure serial in Ulysses 31 and Bob Fischer is on hand to explain how you too can trace patterns from plates like in The Owl Service. So if you want to join in the fun - or just swap a copy of Press Gang: Public Exposure for a copy of The Making Of The Owl Service - ring the show now!You can get The Golden Age Of Children's TV in all good bookshops, and from Amazon here, Waterstones here or directly from Black And White Publishing here - and if you want to know more about what you can find in it, head for timworthington.org!

"A shameless recycling of existing content to drive additional audience engagement on the cheap… or the single best, most valuable, and most insight-dense episode we put out in the entire year, depending on how you want to look at it." — Rob WiblinIt's that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode, including:How to use the microphone on someone's mobile phone to figure out what password they're typing into their laptopWhy mercilessly driving the New World screwworm to extinction could be the most compassionate thing humanity has ever doneWhy evolutionary psychology doesn't support a cynical view of human nature but actually explains why so many of us are intensely sensitive to the harms we cause to othersHow superforecasters and domain experts seem to disagree so much about AI risk, but when you zoom in it's mostly a disagreement about timingWhy the sceptics are wrong and you will want to use robot nannies to take care of your kids — and also why despite having big worries about the development of AGI, Carl Shulman is strongly against efforts to pause AI research todayHow much of the gender pay gap is due to direct pay discrimination vs other factorsHow cleaner wrasse fish blow the mirror test out of the waterWhy effective altruism may be too big a tent to work wellHow we could best motivate pharma companies to test existing drugs to see if they help cure other diseases — something they currently have no reason to bother with…as well as 27 other top observations and arguments from the past year of the show.Check out the full transcript and episode links on the 80,000 Hours website.Remember that all of these clips come from the 20-minute highlight reels we make for every episode, which are released on our sister feed, 80k After Hours. So if you're struggling to keep up with our regularly scheduled entertainment, you can still get the best parts of our conversations there.It has been a hell of a year, and we can only imagine next year is going to be even weirder — but Luisa and Rob will be here to keep you company as Earth hurtles through the galaxy to a fate as yet unknown.Enjoy, and look forward to speaking with you in 2025!Chapters:Rob's intro (00:00:00)Randy Nesse on the origins of morality and the problem of simplistic selfish-gene thinking (00:02:11)Hugo Mercier on the evolutionary argument against humans being gullible (00:07:17)Meghan Barrett on the likelihood of insect sentience (00:11:26)Sébastien Moro on the mirror test triumph of cleaner wrasses (00:14:47)Sella Nevo on side-channel attacks (00:19:32)Zvi Mowshowitz on AI sleeper agents (00:22:59)Zach Weinersmith on why space settlement (probably) won't make us rich (00:29:11)Rachel Glennerster on pull mechanisms to incentivise repurposing of generic drugs (00:35:23)Emily Oster on the impact of kids on women's careers (00:40:29)Carl Shulman on robot nannies (00:45:19)Nathan Labenz on kids and artificial friends (00:50:12)Nathan Calvin on why it's not too early for AI policies (00:54:13)Rose Chan Loui on how control of OpenAI is independently incredibly valuable and requires compensation (00:58:08)Nick Joseph on why he's a big fan of the responsible scaling policy approach (01:03:11)Sihao Huang on how the US and UK might coordinate with China (01:06:09)Nathan Labenz on better transparency about predicted capabilities (01:10:18)Ezra Karger on what explains forecasters' disagreements about AI risks (01:15:22)Carl Shulman on why he doesn't support enforced pauses on AI research (01:18:58)Matt Clancy on the omnipresent frictions that might prevent explosive economic growth (01:25:24)Vitalik Buterin on defensive acceleration (01:29:43)Annie Jacobsen on the war games that suggest escalation is inevitable (01:34:59)Nate Silver on whether effective altruism is too big to succeed (01:38:42)Kevin Esvelt on why killing every screwworm would be the best thing humanity ever did (01:42:27)Lewis Bollard on how factory farming is philosophically indefensible (01:46:28)Bob Fischer on how to think about moral weights if you're not a hedonist (01:49:27)Elizabeth Cox on the empirical evidence of the impact of storytelling (01:57:43)Anil Seth on how our brain interprets reality (02:01:03)Eric Schwitzgebel on whether consciousness can be nested (02:04:53)Jonathan Birch on our overconfidence around disorders of consciousness (02:10:23)Peter Godfrey-Smith on uploads of ourselves (02:14:34)Laura Deming on surprising things that make mice live longer (02:21:17)Venki Ramakrishnan on freezing cells, organs, and bodies (02:24:46)Ken Goldberg on why low fault tolerance makes some skills extra hard to automate in robots (02:29:12)Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on the ups and downs of founding an organisation (02:34:04)Dean Spears on the cost effectiveness of kangaroo mother care (02:38:26)Cameron Meyer Shorb on vaccines for wild animals (02:42:53)Spencer Greenberg on personal principles (02:46:08)Producing and editing: Keiran HarrisAudio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic ArmstrongVideo editing: Simon MonsourTranscriptions: Katy Moore

Welcome to the zoom of role-playing rambling where we are looking backwards to look forwards. This time we are transporting you back to the heady days of 1984. We are joined by the fabulous Bob Fischer who shares the highlights from his 1984 diaries. Judge Blythy, our resident rules lawyer, joins Dirk to determine the … Continue reading "1984: a year in RPGs (with Bob Fischer) Ep75 Pt 1" The post 1984: a year in RPGs (with Bob Fischer) Ep75 Pt 1 first appeared on The GROGNARD Files.

We're far from certain that insects are sentient. But with over a trillion insects farmed annually, the welfare impacts are staggering if they can suffer. Unfortunately, fundamental questions about their well-being remain unexplored. This is where Arthropoda Foundation steps in, actively finding and funding the best opportunities to produce knowledge that can improve the lives of farmed insects. Current Research Priorities Humane Slaughter Protocols Insects are regularly microwaved, baked, and boiled alive. If producers can stun these animals before slaughter, they can reduce significant distress. We've found a lab willing to develop and test electrical stunning procedures for black soldier fly larvae, with an eye to creating an inexpensive, readily implementable system that can be adopted by industry partners. ~$67,000. Stocking Densities and Substrate Research For many farmed insects, the quality of their lives comes down to stocking densities and the substrate in which they're reared—which is what [...] ---Outline:(00:38) Current Research Priorities(00:42) Humane Slaughter Protocols(01:11) Stocking Densities and Substrate Research(01:48) Automated Welfare Assessment(02:33) Funding Needs(03:52) Want to learn more about insects?The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI. --- First published: November 13th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9fuJgLik6FNtgrDAD/support-critical-research-on-insect-welfare --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which writer and occasional broadcaster Tim Worthington talks to a guest about some of the things that they remember that nobody else ever seems to.This is a collection of highlights from Looks Unfamiliar featuring Suzy Robinson on Crown Court, Danny Kodicek on Fox Tales, Bob Fischer and Georgy Jamieson on Why Don't You...?, Paul Abbott on Disneytime Rotadraw, Genevieve Jenner on Fruitopia, Adam S. Leslie on I Heard Your Name by Martin Rev and Justin Lewis on I Hate J.R. by The Wurzels. Along the way we'll be revealing when BBC Test Card F might actually be your less terrifying viewing option, listening to a 1970s heroin-y version of They Might Be Giants, arguing over whether the best Catatonia album was the first one or the first one, assessing the best way to draw TV's Simon And Simon, remaking the Bitter Sweet Symphony video with the bloke out of The Wurzels, speculating on the efficacy of Kiss-Me-Quick-Hats sported by popular television puppets, revisiting Jamiroquai's duet with some puppet caterpillars, soliciting The Jesus And Mary Chain's theories on Who Shot J.R.?, organising a day trip to the exact spot where Roland Rat pushed Kevin The Gerbil down a hill, shuddering at the thought of The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow's most repulsive exhibit and and revealing why the hippy trail is strewn with striking dustbins, cough medicine and Crown Court. Plus there's tips on how Blanco from Porridge can help your party go with a swing! Also there's extracts from Tim talking about Billy Liar on Goon Pod Film Club, Now - The Summer Album on Back To Now and George Martin's By George! on The Big Beatles Sort Out, and an extra bit of Bob and Georgy questioning Will Smith's approach to summertime scheduling...You can find more editions of Looks Unfamiliar at timworthington.org.If you enjoy Looks Unfamiliar, you can help to support the show by buying us a coffee here. It's doubtful WIll Smith would have enough time for one though. Unless he drank it very, very quickly.

Intro Suppose you have $100M to give away. You are drawn to the many important opportunities to reduce animal suffering or address pressing issues in global health and development. Your choice about how to allocate the funds could depend on considerations like these: Moral values: How much moral weight do you assign to various non-human species? Are you focused exclusively on hedonic considerations, like reducing suffering? Or do you have other relevant values, such as autonomy? Cost-effectiveness estimates: Species-discounting aside, how many DALYs/$ do the best projects in the area achieve? How fast do returns diminish in these areas? Decision-theoretic values: How do you feel about risk-taking? Are you willing to tolerate a substantial probability that projects will fail? What about non-trivial chances of projects backfiring? Second-order effects: Will giving to one cause set benefit any of your other values? Are there speculative benefits that might flow from [...] ---Outline:(00:09) Intro(02:47) Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model(02:51) How it works(04:25) What it says(06:53) Portfolio Builder Tool(06:57) How it works(08:12) What it says(10:32) Moral Parliament Tool(10:36) How it works(11:48) What it says(12:02) Parliament composition matters(14:10) Allocation strategy matters(17:27) ConclusionsThe original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. The original text contained 11 images which were described by AI. --- First published: October 7th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vEwGx9RXnHaMyKhZM/what-do-rp-s-tools-tell-us-about-giving-usd100m-to-aw-or-ghd --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which writer and occasional broadcaster Tim Worthington talks to a guest about some of the things that they remember that nobody else ever seems to.This time, in a special summer edition, Tim, Bob Fischer and Georgy Jamieson are all crowding into a sweltering local radio studio with only a lone copy of the Capital Radio DJs' Dot Cotton and Thatcher impression-led parody cover of The Holiday Rap by MC Miker G And DJ Sven to hand, ready to take your calls about some of the seaside tat and summer holiday boredom that - perhaps thankfully - you just don't seem to get any more. So that's morning television being full of crackly old repeated imports and Why Don't You...?, Breakfast Television insisting on presenting daily roving 'saucy' reports from seaside towns, everyone watching the tennis and cricket coverage for the theme music and then switching off, the Radio 1 Roadshow, badly-planned interminable car journeys to rain-lashed resorts, those weird shops that sold plastic fishing nets and fold-up aviator shades and arcades that had one lone solitary 'Space Invaders' machine, the newsagent wheeling out that big freezer for another summer of rivalry between Wall's and Lyons Maid and much more besides. In a drizzly heatwave of a chat we'll be speculating on the efficacy of Kiss-Me-Quick-Hats sported by popular television puppets, searching for Ian Botham's constantly moving speakeasy, visiting the Motorway Service Station Mirror Universe, revisiting the BBC's 'Summer Apes' Season, celebrating the work of the Gary Davies Elvis fairground artist, despairing of the rival rivalries between Mr. Freeze and Ice Pops and The Halfwits and The Dingbats, revealing why all ice cream vans have an army of Mods in hot pursuit, organising a day trip to the exact spot where Roland Rat pushed Kevin The Gerbil down a hill, going to see Confessions Of A Ventriloquist starring Robin Askwith and Richard Herring, not staring at Erika Roe on an on-the-spot report live from a joke shop and debating whether summer is ever truly summer if you haven't spent the entirety of it throwing a tennis ball against a wall. Call in and tell us the most you've ever won on a 'one-armed bandit' now!You can find more editions of Looks Unfamiliar at http://timworthington.org/. You can also find Bob and Georgy on Looks Unfamiliar taking a look at some of their favourite forgotten Christmas trimmings here as well as Bob on The Tom O'Connor Roadshow, Giant Hogweed, Can't Get A Ticket (For The World Cup) by Peter Dean, Glee Bars, J. Edward Oliver's ‘Abolish Tuesdays' and How To Be A Wally here, Eighties ‘Tabloid Celebrities', Accidentally Kelly Street by Frente!, The Two Ronnies' ‘Mileaway', Rude Food, Suggs On Saturday and School Folk Songs here and Tucker's Luck, Pookiesnackenburger, We Wanna Be Famous by Buster Gobsmack And Eats Filth', game show contestants' occupations being booed by the studio audience and the lost ancient art of the paper plate and shaving foam Custard Pie here, and Georgy on Indoor League, Re-Joyce!, the The Animals In The Box sketch, the Paul Squire Fan Club, Pippa Dolls, Pig In The Middle and Good Winter Telly here.If you enjoy Looks Unfamiliar, you can help to support the show by buying us a coffee here. In a mug large enough to spare Erika Roe's modesty please.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AMA: Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigation Team, published by Bob Fischer on July 31, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigation Team (WIT) will run an Ask Me Anything (AMA). We'll reply on the 7th and 8th of August. Please put your questions in the comments below! What's WIT? WIT is Hayley Clatterbuck, Bob Fischer, Arvo Munoz Moran, David Moss, and Derek Shiller. Our team exists to improve resource allocation within and beyond the effective altruism movement, focusing on tractable, high-impact questions that bear on strategic priorities. We try to take action-relevant philosophical, methodological, and strategic problems and turn them into manageable, modelable problems. Our projects have included: The Moral Weight Project. If we want to do as much good as possible, we have to compare all the ways of doing good - including ways that involve helping members of different species. This sequence collects Rethink Priorities' work on cause prioritization across different kinds of animals, human and nonhuman. (You can check out the book version here.) The CURVE Sequence. What are the alternatives to expected value maximization (EVM) for cause prioritization? And what are the practical implications of a commitment to expected value maximization? This series of posts - and an associated tool, the Cross-Cause Cost-Effectivesness Model - explores these questions. The CRAFT Sequence. This sequence introduces two tools: a Portfolio Builder, where the key uncertainties concern cost curves and decision theories, and a Moral Parliament Tool, which allows for the modeling of both normative and metanormative uncertainty. The Sequence's primary goal is to take some first steps toward more principled and transparent ways of constructing giving portfolios. In the coming months, we'll be working on a model to assess the probability of digital consciousness. What should you ask us? Anything! Possible topics include: How we understand our place in the EA ecosystem. Why we're so into modeling. Our future plans and what we'd do with additional resources. What it's like doing "academic" work outside of academia. Biggest personal updates from the work we've done. Acknowledgments This post was written by the Worldview Investigation Team at Rethink Priorities. If you like our work, please consider subscribing to our newsletter. You can explore our completed public work here. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Taking Uncertainty Seriously (or, Why Tools Matter), published by Bob Fischer on July 19, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Executive Summary We should take uncertainty seriously. Rethink Priorities' Moral Parliament Tool, for instance, highlights that whether a worldview favors a particular project depends on relatively small differences in empirical assumptions and the way we characterize the commitments of that worldview. We have good reason to be uncertain: The relevant empirical and philosophical issues are difficult. We're largely guessing when it comes to most of the key empirical claims associated with Global Catastrophic Risks and Animal Welfare. As a community, EA has some objectionable epistemic features - e.g., it can be an echo chamber - that should probably make us less confident of the claims that are popular within it. The extent of our uncertainty is a reason to build models more like the Portfolio Builder and Moral Parliament Tools and less like traditional BOTECs. This is because: Our models allow you to change parameters systematically to see how those changes affect allocations, permitting sensitivity analyses. BOTECs don't deliver optimizations. BOTECs don't systematically incorporate alternative decision theories or moral views. Building a general tool requires you to formulate general assumptions about the functional relationships between different parameters. If you don't build general tools, then it's easier to make ad hoc assumptions (or ad hoc adjustments to your assumptions). Introduction Most philanthropic actors, whether individuals or large charitable organizations, support a variety of cause areas and charities. How should they prioritize between altruistic opportunities in light of their beliefs and decision-theoretic commitments? The CRAFT Sequence explores the challenge of constructing giving portfolios. Over the course of this sequence - and, in particular, through Rethink Priorities' Portfolio Builder and Moral Parliament Tools - we've investigated the factors that influence our views about optimal giving. For instance, we may want to adjust our allocations based on the diminishing returns of particular projects, to hedge against risk, to accommodate moral uncertainty, or based on our preferred procedure for moving from our commitments to an overall portfolio. In this final post, we briefly recap the CRAFT Sequence, discuss the importance of uncertainty, and argue why we should be quite uncertain about any particular combination of empirical, normative, and metanormative judgments. We think that there is a good case for developing and using frameworks and tools like the ones CRAFT offers to help us navigate our uncertainty. Recapping CRAFT We can be uncertain about a wide range of empirical questions, ranging from the probability that an intervention has a positive effect of some magnitude to the rate at which returns diminish. We can be uncertain about a wide range of normative questions, ranging from the amount of credit that an actor can take to the value we ought to assign to various possible futures. We can be uncertain about a wide range of metanormative questions, ranging from the correct decision theory to the correct means of resolving disagreements among our normative commitments. Over the course of this sequence - and, in particular, through Rethink Priorities' Portfolio Builder and Moral Parliament Tools - we've tried to do two things. First, we've tried to motivate some of these uncertainties: We've explored alternatives to EV maximization's use as a decision procedure. Even if EV maximization is the correct criterion of rationality, it's questionable as a decision procedure that ordinary, fallible people can use to make decisions given all their uncertainties and limitations. We've explored the problems and prom...

Link to tool: https://parliament.rethinkpriorities.org (1 min) Introductory Video (6 min) Basic Features Video Executive Summary This post introduces Rethink Priorities' Moral Parliament Tool, which models ways an agent can make decisions about how to allocate goods in light of normative uncertainty. We treat normative uncertainty as uncertainty over worldviews. A worldview encompasses a set of normative commitments, including first-order moral theories, values, and attitudes toward risk. We represent worldviews as delegates in a moral parliament who decide on an allocation of funds to a diverse array of charitable projects. Users can configure the parliament to represent their own credences in different worldviews and choose among several procedures for finding their best all-things-considered philanthropic allocation. The relevant procedures are metanormative methods. These methods take worldviews and our credences in them as inputs and produce some action guidance as an output. Some proposed methods have taken inspiration from political or market processes involving agents [...] ---Outline:(00:24) Executive Summary(02:18) Introduction(03:47) How does it work?(04:21) Worldviews(08:07) Projects(10:45) Metanormative parliament(12:11) The Moral Parliament Tool at work(12:16) (How) do empirical assumptions matter?(12:20) Uncertainties about scale(14:13) How much does scale matter?(16:10) An example project: The Cassandra Fund(19:15) What would an EA parliament do?(19:21) Normative uncertainty among EAs(21:17) Results(24:12) Takeaways(26:40) Getting Started(27:04) AcknowledgmentsThe original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. The original text contained 17 images which were described by AI. --- First published: July 17th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HxphJhSiXBQ74uxJX/rethink-priorities-moral-parliament-tool --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: An Introduction to the CRAFT Sequence, published by Bob Fischer on July 8, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post introduces Rethink Priorities' Charitable Resource Allocation Frameworks and Tools Sequence (the CRAFT Sequence). After a brief statement of the problems that CRAFT aims to address, we provide an overview of what it includes. Building Giving Portfolios Some people think that you should go all-in on particular giving opportunities. Some people think that you should diversify your giving portfolio. What assumptions and circumstances favor going all-in? What assumptions and circumstances favor diversification? And either way, what should your resources support? Rethink Priorities' recent Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model (CCM) can help us rank interventions within certain cause areas. It can also help us rank options based on a handful of key decision theories. However, the CCM isn't designed to produce giving portfolios per se. The CCM can help us compare interventions with respect to their expected value or risk-adjusted value. But it was never intended to answer the question: "How should I split a certain amount of money given what matters to me?" We need other tools for that purpose. The CRAFT Sequence introduces beta versions of two such tools: a risk-based portfolio builder, where the key uncertainties concern cost curves and decision theories, and a moral-parliament-based portfolio builder, which allows for the modeling of both normative and metanormative uncertainty. The Sequence's primary goal is to take some first steps toward more principled and transparent ways of constructing giving portfolios. Our tools make debates about worldviews more tractable by illustrating how assumptions about cost curves, attitudes toward risk, and credences in moral theories can influence allocation decisions. These tools are limited in ways you would expect. Their specific recommendations are only as good as their highly uncertain inputs; they assume that you're acting in isolation even though others' allocations can be relevant to what's optimal for you; they sometimes sacrifice granularity for computational efficiency; and so on. Still, the process of operationalizing and implementing proposals is instructive: it makes the choice points clear, it automates relevant calculations, it makes optimization possible, and it paves the way for future research. These tools therefore offer significant improvements over commonly used BOTECs. What's to Come In the coming sequence, we will introduce and comment on two tools for constructing portfolios: one focused on cost-effectiveness under various attitudes toward risk and a second that uses a moral parliament to allocate resources under metanormative uncertainty. The second post introduces the Portfolio Builder Tool that allows you to build a giving portfolio based on (a) the amount of money you want to give, (b) your attitudes toward risk, and (c) some assumptions about the features of the interventions you're considering. The third and fourth posts explore two risk attitudes that this tool incorporates. The third considers challenges to caring about making a difference; the fourth considers the common practice of "rounding down" low probabilities, which is one way of implementing an aversion to poorly justified probabilities. Of course, people don't simply have different attitudes toward risk; they also give some credence to a range of different moral views. So, the fifth post introduces our Moral Parliament Tool, which allows users to consider the impact of moral uncertainty in addition to various risk attitudes. This tool implements a moral parliament and several voting procedures for adjudicating disagreements among the delegates. And, like the first tool, the associated documentation explores the philosophic...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rethink Priorities' Digital Consciousness Project Announcement, published by Bob Fischer on July 5, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. One of the core questions regarding the moral status of AI concerns their consciousness. Is there anything it's like to be them? Contemporary AI systems are widely regarded as clearly not conscious, but there seems to be growing concern among experts that we may see conscious AI systems in the not-too-distant future. Understanding our duties to the AI systems we create will involve assessing the nature of their minds, and thus their moral status. There are many important questions about AI minds that bear on their moral status, but whether they are consciousness has a clear and widely recognized role. In addition, it may be important in securing or denying AIs the public's moral consideration. Existing consciousness research revolves first and foremost around human beings. The physical bases (or neural correlates) of consciousness in humans remain uncertain. Leading proposals are both vague and highly controversial. Extending theories of consciousness to AIs will require careful thought about how to generalize beyond the human case. Alternatively, we might look to identify behavioral indicators of consciousness. Behavior has a much more salient role in swaying our attitudes than abstract considerations of architecture. But modern AIs are carefully trained to behave like us, and so it is not easy to tell whether their behaviors indicate anything beyond mimicry. Therefore, we see a variety of kinds of uncertainty at play: there is methodological uncertainty, uncertainty regarding the underpinnings of human consciousness, uncertainty regarding the significance of behavioral evidence, uncertainty about how AIs work, etc. Coming up with any concrete estimate of the probability of consciousness in AI systems will require mapping, measuring, and aggregating these uncertainties. Rethink Priorities has overcome similar challenges before. Our Moral Weight Project wrangled patchy evidence about behavioral traits and cognitive capacities across the animal kingdom through a Monte Carlo framework that output probabilistic estimates of welfare ranges for different species. We learned a lot from this work and we are eager to apply those lessons to a new challenge. We are now turning to the question of how best to assess the probability of AI consciousness. Over the coming months, we plan to carry out a project encompassing the following tasks: 1. Evaluating different modeling approaches to AI consciousness estimation. What different paradigms are worth exploring? What are the pros and cons of each? 2. Identifying some plausible proxies for consciousness to feed into these models. What are the challenges in pinning down values for these proxies? Where might future technical work be most fruitful? 3. Producing a prototype model that translates uncertainty about different sources of evidence into probability ranges for contemporary and hypothetical future AI models. Given our uncertainties, what should we conclude about the overall probability of consciousness? Having such a model is valuable in a few different ways. First, we can produce an overall estimate of the probability that a given system is conscious - an estimate that's informed by, rather than undermined by, our uncertainty about the correct theory of consciousness. Second, because the inputs to the process can be updated with new information as, say, new capabilities come online, we can readily update our overall estimate of the probability of consciousness. Third, because we can repeat this process based on the capabilities that were present at earlier dates, we can also model the historical rate of change in the probability of digital consciousness. In principle, we can use that to make...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AI, Animals, and Digital Minds 2024 - Retrospective, published by Constance Li on June 19, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This is a retrospective of the AIADM 2024 Conference, Retreat, and Co-working in London. Tl;dr: ~130 people joined together over the span of three days to learn, connect, and make progress towards making AI safe for nonhumans. Background This event followed in the footsteps of the October 2023 Artificial Intelligence, Conscious Machines, and Animals: Broadening AI Ethics conference held at Princeton by Peter Singer, Tse Yip Fai, Leonie Bossert and Thilo Hagendorff. It was planned in a [formerly private] AI Coalition channel on the Hive Slack that many of the attendees of the original conference were invited to for the purposes of continuing conversation. It was here that I discovered that running the conference in 2024 would be highly counterfactual because Peter Singer was retiring from Princeton and none of the previous organizers were planning on repeating it. We were able to get permission to hold the second iteration of the conference and even got a promotional endorsement by Peter Singer. The process of planning took place over several months and was independently funded. Objective The goal for this event was to explore how we can develop AI technologies in a way that protects and benefits nonhuman animals and potentially sentient AI. We had the dual purpose of increasing the salience of the field of AI and Nonhumans and also getting potential leaders to network with one another. To advance the former goal, the content and programming needed to be highly accessible so we made it hybrid, recorded as much as practical, created website pages and social media assets for speakers to help with pre-conference promotion and future SEO for the speakers, and added more event space as the RSVPs crept up. It was open to anyone who could offer value to furthering this field, including, but not limited to, thought leaders, researchers, industry workers, funders and hopeful future contributors. Timing and location All in-person events took place in London immediately after EAG London (May 31 - June 2) June 3: Conference (hybrid: onsite - live room and overflow room, offsite - livestreaming, and virtual) June 4-5: Retreat (virtual and in-person options that only synced up during hour of livestreamed lightning talks) June 6-11: Co-working (in person) Attendees There were 260+ applications for attendance. A directory was created of people who consented to have their application answers shared with other attendees. These included answers to questions such as: What is your experience or demonstrated interest in the topic? Why do you want to attend? What can you offer to other attendees? Conference The 1st day was a hybrid conference: It took place at the London School of Economics (LSE), split between 2 rooms which had around 50-60 total attendees.It was also streamed live to Newspeak House which had 10-15 attendees. Around 50-70 people attended via zoom. We had a very tight schedule and prioritized having more time for Q&A so each talk was only 10 - 20 minutes long and we grouped similar talks together as panels. Sessions AI for Animals Towards Ethical AI: Collaborative Efforts for Animal Welfare under the EU's AI Act by Dr Fakhra Ikhlaq and Dr Saeed Ahmad ( watch session | view slides) AI's Potential to Map Animal Suffering: Insights from the Welfare Footprint Framework by Wladimir Alonso ( watch session | view slides) Animal-friendly AI = Misaligned AI by Bob Fischer ( watch session | view slides) Building Pro-Animal AI Systems panel by Sam Tucker and Sankalpa Ghose ( watch session | view slides) AI in Farming panel by Virginie Simoneau-Gilbert, Amber Elise Sheldon, and Walter Veit ( watch session | view all slides) Digital Minds Changing attitudes to...

The Arthropoda Foundation Tens of trillions of insects are used or killed by humans across dozens of industries. Despite being the most numerous animal species reared by animal industries, we know next to nothing about what's good or bad for these animals. And right now, funding for this work is scarce. Traditional science funders won't pay for it; and within EA, the focus is on advocacy, not research. So, welfare science needs your help. We're launching the Arthropoda Foundation, a fund to ensure that insect welfare science gets the essential resources it needs to provide decision-relevant answers to pressing questions. Every dollar we raise will be granted to research projects that can't be funded any other way. We're in a critical moment for this work. Over the last year, field-building efforts have accelerated, setting up academic labs that can tackle key studies. However, funding for these studies is [...] ---Outline:(00:10) The Arthropoda Foundation(01:17) Why do we need a fund?(02:55) Team--- First published: June 14th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2NsS7gjccJAKMf4co/help-fund-insect-welfare-science --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Help Fund Insect Welfare Science, published by Bob Fischer on June 14, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The Arthropoda Foundation Tens of trillions of insects are used or killed by humans across dozens of industries. Despite being the most numerous animal species reared by animal industries, we know next to nothing about what's good or bad for these animals. And right now, funding for this work is scarce. Traditional science funders won't pay for it; and within EA, the focus is on advocacy, not research. So, welfare science needs your help. We're launching the Arthropoda Foundation, a fund to ensure that insect welfare science gets the essential resources it needs to provide decision-relevant answers to pressing questions. Every dollar we raise will be granted to research projects that can't be funded any other way. We're in a critical moment for this work. Over the last year, field-building efforts have accelerated, setting up academic labs that can tackle key studies. However, funding for these studies is now uncertain. We need resources to sustain the research required to improve the welfare of insects. Why do we need a fund? We need a fund because we need a runway for high-priority research. Scientists need to make plans over several years, not a few months. They have to commit now to a grad student who starts next year and finishes a project two years after that. The fund helps guarantee that resources will be there to support academics in the long-term, ensuring that entire labs can remain devoted to this work. We need a fund because we need to let researchers be researchers, not fundraisers. A fund doesn't just buy critical research; it buys the ability of the world's few insect welfare scientists to focus on what matters. We need a fund because funding scientific research on insect welfare isn't easy for individual donors. First, it's hard to know what to fund. As some of the few researchers who have worked on these issues in EA, we're lending our expertise to vet opportunities. Second, universities take overhead that reduces the impact of your donations; an independent fund can use the board's volunteer labor to make the many small reimbursements that are required to cover costs directly. Third, if you're a donor who's giving below the amounts required to support entire projects, your opportunities are extremely limited. This fund smooths over such hurdles, ensuring that everyone can support the highest value research. This fund gives a brand new field some time to get established, it gives that field the resources required to produce essential science, and it keeps that research as cost-effective as possible. Please support welfare science. Team Bob Fischer is a Professor at Texas State University and the lead project manager and author of the Moral Weight Project, a research project to build comparative models of moral weight across animal species. Daniela Waldhorn is the Director of Animal Welfare research at Rethink Priorities, a board member of the Centre for Animal Ethics at Pompeu Fabra University, and lead author on the largest initial EA project focused on studying invertebrate welfare. Abraham Rowe is the Principal of Good Structures, a nonprofit operations service provider, and was previously the COO of Rethink Priorities, and the co-founder and Executive Director of Wild Animal Initiative, an academic field-building and grantmaking organization supporting research on wild animal welfare. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Texas State University's Bob Fischer, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, joins the Big Ideas TXST podcast to discuss the ethics of insect sentience.  The debate over animal sentience has persisted for centuries. Broadly speaking, it's generally accepted that mammals, reptiles, birds and fish have degrees of sentience—that is, they are conscious and can feel both pleasure and pain. But what about insects? Fischer explains that mounting evidence indicates that at least some insects exhibit behavior attributable to pleasure and pain responses. If so, then what are the ethical implications for the billions of interactions between humans and insects every day?   Fischer earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2011. He is a senior research manager for Rethink Priorities and the director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals.  

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which writer and occasional broadcaster Tim Worthington talks to a guest about some of the things that they remember that nobody else ever seems to.This is a collection of highlights from Looks Unfamiliar featuring Lydia Mizon on Smashie And Nicey - The End Of An Era, Katy Brent on Global Hypercolor, Tim Worthington on Wonderwall by The Mike Flowers Pops and the BBC Pinocchio, Ricardo Autobahn on the Panther 6, Mitch Benn on BusyBodies, Joanne Sheppard on The Water Babies and Spine Chillers, Phil Norman on Spy Trap and Bob Fischer and Georgy Jamieson an dancing reindeer and school recorder ensembles. Along the way we'll be revealing how to avoid getting caught literally Global Hypercolor-handed, averting a Radio Times listing for Starved Robin Askwith, questioning why Richard Herring never has sports cars as guests on RHLSTP, debating the plural of ‘A Ghost Story For Christmas' and querying the value of using Rentaghost as a sort of all-purpose philosophical yardstick.You can find the full versions of all of these shows and lots more editions of Looks Unfamiliar besides at http://timworthington.org/.If you enjoy Looks Unfamiliar, you can help to support the show by buying us a coffee here. One of those chains probably even does a Texan Bar Latte. For National Patrick Mower week or something. If there isn't one, there ought to be.

Bob Fischer is the Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University.Can insects feel pain? Should people who care about chickens, cows and pigs also care about reducing the suffering of crickets or black soldier flies? In this episode with Bob Fischer from Rethink Priorities, we try to answer some of those questions, as well as talking about the rapidly growing insect industry, and possible ways for advocates to help farmed insects.We talk about lots of interesting content and research, for some of which there are excellent visualisations, which we'll link to at the top of the show notes. I highly recommend checking out the Welfare Range Table and Rethink Priorities' Welfare Range estimates to help better understand some of the points here, both of which are linked.  Bob also had a great conversation on the 80,000 Hours Podcast about the moral weights project more broadly and how they want to try to compare welfare across different species of animals. We think they covered it very well, so we didn't speak much about it today, so we'll link it for interested folks. Relevant links to things mentioned throughout the show:Cognitive and hedonic proxies of different animals from Rethink Priorities Moral Weights Project Rethink Priorities' Welfare Range estimatesFor more on this, listen to Bob's great episode on the 80,000 Hours podcast Research paper, “Can Insects Feel Pain?”, which found that two orders of insects (which include cockroaches, termites, flies and mosquitos) met more criteria to feel pain than decapod crustaceans (e.g. crabs, lobsters, shrimp), which are recognised as sentient by the UK government. How I Learned To Love Shrimp YouTube Channel Meghan Barrett's handbook chapterBarn 8 by Deb Olin UnferthDominion by Matthew ScullyDonate to Insect Welfare Research SocietyDonate to Rethink PrioritiesNewsletter for Insect Welfare Research SocietyNewsletter for Rethink Priorities If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - we would really appreciate it! Likewise, feel free to share it with anyone who you think might enjoy it. You can send us feedback and guest recommendations via Twitter or email us at hello@howilearnedtoloveshrimp.com. Enjoy!

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Deontological Constraints on Animal Products, published by emre kaplan on April 9, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Introduction There is a memetically powerful argument within animal advocacy circles which goes like the following: "We would never ask child abusers to commit less child abuse, so we can't ask other people to reduce their animal product consumption. We must ask them to end it." In this post I try to construct and evaluate a part of this argument. First, I explain my motivation for evaluating the strength of this argument. Second, I note that it's morally permissible to ask for reductions in some kinds of wrongdoings and list different ways animal production consumption can be morally wrong. I create the category of "non-negotiably wrong" to refer to actions that can't be asked to be reduced. Third, I look into whether animal product use might be non-negotiably wrong by listing several deontological constraints that might be non-negotiable. A Venn Diagram summarising results I don't have any strong conclusions. I aim to reduce my own confusion and get more input from professional moral philosophers on this topic through this post. I'm also not sure if I should keep writing such posts, so if this post is helpful to you in any way, please let me know. Many thanks to Michael St. Jules and Bob Fischer for their helpful feedback. All errors are my own. Motivation Some animal advocates argue for the following positions because they believe people have a non-negotiable duty to avoid consuming animal products: Only vegans can speak at animal advocacy events Only vegans can be members of animal advocacy organisations Non-vegans shouldn't join animal advocacy protests All animal advocacy organisations have a responsibility to prominently advocate for veganism because it's the main obligation to animals It's morally forbidden to use the following sentences because they condone some animal product use or don't explicitly reject all animal product use: Go vegetarian. Meat should be taxed. Our school should have Meatless Mondays. Costco should go cage-free. The default school meals at Grenoble should be vegetarian. The public schools in New York City should serve exclusively plant-based food on Fridays. Take the vegan-22 challenge, go vegan for 22 days. Maybe you should try going plant-based except for cheese. According to this line of argument, animal product use is not merely harmful(akin to carbon emissions) but also violation of a very strong moral constraint(akin to direct physical violence or owning slaves). It is non-negotiably wrong. For that reason, including non-vegans in animal advocacy is similar to including slave-owners in anti-slavery advocacy. Asking for a reduction in animal product use is akin to asking for a reduction in physical violence("don't beat your wife in January"). To clarify, as it is the case with many issues, there is a spectrum of opinions here. Some people will endorse some of the positions above while rejecting others. I have been sympathetic to these arguments when it comes to my own consumption. I'm very sympathetic to the idea that since animals are not well-represented, we're likely to have a bias against their interests. When animal interests and my own interests get into conflict, it makes sense for me to be extra cautious to compensate for my own bias. So I'm happy with being strict in avoiding animal products in clothing and food. On the other hand, I also suspect being too restrictive in animal advocacy might result in more animals being killed and tortured compared to alternatives. Some reasons offered are the following: There might be a Laffer curve to the behaviour change created by your demands. Being too demanding might result in less change than being moderately demanding. (Example: The New York City officials won...

Jay Moussa-Mann is a singer and songwriter whose songs have been played repeatedly on BBC Introducing and BBC Radio 6. With her unique lyrical style, Jay explores themes of love and belonging in her music, writing each song as though it were a scene in a movie. Her songs describe the human moments of life. In 2018 her song Tides of Life was picked up by BBC Introducing Tees. Throughout 2018 and 2019 Jays tracks were played consistently and championed by BBC Introducing. She was invited to play live on the Bob Fischer afternoon show, her tracks were played by Tom Robinson on BBC Radio 6 Music and in 2019 Jay was invited to play at Twisterella Festival. She has supported talents such as Serious Sam, Ren Lawton, Amelia Coburn, Jodie Nicholson and played at the Tall Ships Races, Hartlepool. She took part in Sage Summer Studios in August 2020. Following that she applied for the Do It Differently Award through Help Musicians and was granted funding which enabled her to record her first pop album, working with producer Patrick Jordan (Motions, Young Rebel Set). Her first single off that album, American Tennessee, was chosen in the roundup of BBC Introducing Tees Best of 2021. It won Track of the Week on BBC Tees Introducing and was in the last 50 semi-finalists for the Road to Nashville International Song Contest, chosen out of 20,305 entries. In 2022 Jay was accepted onto the Co-Pilot mentoring scheme and worked with award winning jazz artist Martha D Lewis to develop her skills. Jay's self titled pop album around the theme of break ups was released 14th February 2023. #MusicInterviews #SocialMedia #Podcast

This is a selection of highlights from episode #182 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast.These aren't necessarily the most important, or even most entertaining parts of the interview — and if you enjoy this, we strongly recommend checking out the full episode:Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and moreAnd if you're finding these highlights episodes valuable, please let us know by emailing podcast@80000hours.org.Highlights put together by Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: #182 - Comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more (Bob Fischer on the 80,000 Hours Podcast), published by 80000 Hours on March 13, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. We just published an interview: Bob Fischer on comparing the welfare of humans, chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and more. Listen on Spotify or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts. Episode summary [One] thing is just to spend time thinking about the kinds of things animals can do and what their lives are like. Just how hard a chicken will work to get to a nest box before she lays an egg, the amount of labour she's willing to go through to do that, to think about how important that is to her. And to realise that we can quantify that, and see how much they care, or to see that they get stressed out when fellow chickens are threatened and that they seem to have some sympathy for conspecifics. Those kinds of things make me say there is something in there that is recognisable to me as another individual, with desires and preferences and a vantage point on the world, who wants things to go a certain way and is frustrated and upset when they don't. And recognising the individuality, the perspective of nonhuman animals, for me, really challenges my tendency to not take them as seriously as I think I ought to, all things considered. Bob Fischer In today's episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Bob Fischer - senior research manager at Rethink Priorities and the director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals - about Rethink Priorities's Moral Weight Project. They cover: The methods used to assess the welfare ranges and capacities for pleasure and pain of chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and other animals - and the limitations of that approach. Concrete examples of how someone might use the estimated moral weights to compare the benefits of animal vs human interventions. The results that most surprised Bob. Why the team used a hedonic theory of welfare to inform the project, and what non-hedonic theories of welfare might bring to the table. Thought experiments like Tortured Tim that test different philosophical assumptions about welfare. Confronting our own biases when estimating animal mental capacities and moral worth. The limitations of using neuron counts as a proxy for moral weights. How different types of risk aversion, like avoiding worst-case scenarios, could impact cause prioritisation. And plenty more. Producer and editor: Keiran Harris Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell Technical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez Transcriptions: Katy Moore Highlights Using neuron counts as a proxy for sentience Luisa Rodriguez: A colleague of yours at Rethink Priorities has written this report on why neuron counts aren't actually a good proxy for what we care about here. Can you give a quick summary of why they think that? Bob Fischer: Sure. There are two things to say. One is that it isn't totally crazy to use neuron counts. And one way of seeing why you might think it's not totally crazy is to think about the kinds of proxies that economists have used when trying to estimate human welfare. Economists have for a long time used income as a proxy for human welfare. You might say that we know that there are all these ways in which that fails as a proxy - and the right response from the economist is something like, do you have anything better? Where there's actually data, and where we can answer at least some of these high-level questions that we care about? Or at least make progress on the high-level questions that we care about relative to baseline? And I think that way of thinking about what neuron-count-based proxies ar...

"[One] thing is just to spend time thinking about the kinds of things animals can do and what their lives are like. Just how hard a chicken will work to get to a nest box before she lays an egg, the amount of labour she's willing to go through to do that, to think about how important that is to her. And to realise that we can quantify that, and see how much they care, or to see that they get stressed out when fellow chickens are threatened and that they seem to have some sympathy for conspecifics."Those kinds of things make me say there is something in there that is recognisable to me as another individual, with desires and preferences and a vantage point on the world, who wants things to go a certain way and is frustrated and upset when they don't. And recognising the individuality, the perspective of nonhuman animals, for me, really challenges my tendency to not take them as seriously as I think I ought to, all things considered." — Bob FischerIn today's episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Bob Fischer — senior research manager at Rethink Priorities and the director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals — about Rethink Priorities's Moral Weight Project.Links to learn more, summary, and full transcript.They cover:The methods used to assess the welfare ranges and capacities for pleasure and pain of chickens, pigs, octopuses, bees, and other animals — and the limitations of that approach.Concrete examples of how someone might use the estimated moral weights to compare the benefits of animal vs human interventions.The results that most surprised Bob.Why the team used a hedonic theory of welfare to inform the project, and what non-hedonic theories of welfare might bring to the table.Thought experiments like Tortured Tim that test different philosophical assumptions about welfare.Confronting our own biases when estimating animal mental capacities and moral worth.The limitations of using neuron counts as a proxy for moral weights.How different types of risk aversion, like avoiding worst-case scenarios, could impact cause prioritisation.And plenty more.Chapters:Welfare ranges (00:10:19)Historical assessments (00:16:47)Method (00:24:02)The present / absent approach (00:27:39)Results (00:31:42)Chickens (00:32:42)Bees (00:50:00)Salmon and limits of methodology (00:56:18)Octopuses (01:00:31)Pigs (01:27:50)Surprises about the project (01:30:19)Objections to the project (01:34:25)Alternative decision theories and risk aversion (01:39:14)Hedonism assumption (02:00:54)Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Simon Monsour and Milo McGuireAdditional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa RodriguezTranscriptions: Katy Moore

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Solution to the two envelopes problem for moral weights, published by MichaelStJules on February 19, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary When taking expected values, the results can differ radically based on which common units we fix across possibilities. If we normalize relative to the value of human welfare, then other animals will tend to be prioritized more than by normalizing by the value of animal welfare or by using other approaches to moral uncertainty. For welfare comparisons and prioritization between different moral patients like humans, other animals, aliens and artificial systems, I argue that we should fix and normalize relative to the moral value of human welfare, because our understanding of the value of welfare is based on our own experiences of welfare, which we directly value. Uncertainty about animal moral weights is about the nature of our experiences and to what extent other animals have capacities similar to those that ground our value, and so empirical uncertainty, not moral uncertainty ( more). I revise the account in light of the possibility of multiple different human reference points between which we don't have fixed uncertainty-free comparisons of value, like pleasure vs belief-like preferences (cognitive desires) vs non-welfare moral reasons, or specific instances of these. If and because whatever moral reasons we apply to humans, (similar or other) moral reasons aren't too unlikely to apply with a modest fraction of the same force to other animals, then the results would still be relatively animal-friendly ( more). I outline why this condition plausibly holds across moral reasons and theories, so that it's plausible we should be fairly animal-friendly ( more). I describe and respond to some potential objections: There could be inaccessible or unaccessed conscious subsystems in our brains that our direct experiences and intuitions do not (adequately) reflect, and these should be treated like additional moral patients ( more). The approach could lead to unresolvable disagreements between moral agents, but this doesn't seem any more objectionable than any other disagreement about what matters (more). Epistemic modesty about morality may push for also separately normalizing by the values of nonhumans or against these comparisons altogether, but this doesn't seem to particularly support the prioritization of humans ( more). I consider whether similar arguments apply in cases of realism vs illusionism about phenomenal consciousness, moral realism vs moral antirealism, and person-affecting views vs total utilitarianism, and find them less compelling for these cases, because value may be grounded on fundamentally different things ( more). How this work has changed my mind: I was originally very skeptical of intertheoretic comparisons of value/reasons in general, including across theories of consciousness and the scaling of welfare and moral weights between animals, because of the two envelopes problem ( Tomasik, 2013-2018) and the apparent arbitrariness involved. This lasted until around December 2023, and some arguments here were originally going to be part of a piece strongly against such comparisons for cross-species moral weights, which I now respond to here along with positive arguments for comparisons. Acknowledgements I credit Derek Shiller and Adam Shriver for the idea of treating the problem like epistemic uncertainty relative to what we experience directly. I'd also like to thank Brian Tomasik, Derek Shiller and Bob Fischer for feedback. All errors are my own. Background On the allocation between the animal-inclusive and human-centric near-termist views, specifically, Karnofsky ( 2018) raised a problem: The "animal-inclusive" vs. "human-centric" divide could be interpreted as being about a form of "normative uncertainty": un...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Types of subjective welfare, published by MichaelStJules on February 2, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary I describe and review four broad potential types of subjective welfare: 1) hedonic states, i.e. pleasure and unpleasantness, 2) felt desires, both appetitive and aversive, 3) belief-like preferences, i.e. preferences as judgements or beliefs about value, and 4) choice-based preferences, i.e. what we choose or would choose. My key takeaways are the following: Belief-like preferences and choice-based preferences seem unlikely to be generally comparable, and even comparisons between humans can be problematic ( more). Hedonic states, felt desires and belief-like preferences all plausibly matter intrinsically, possibly together in a morally pluralistic theory, or unified as subjective appearances of value or even under belief-like preferences ( more). Choice-based preferences seem not to matter much or at all intrinsically ( more). The types of welfare are dissociable, so measuring one in terms of another is likely to misweigh it relative to more intuitive direct standards and risks discounting plausible moral patients altogether ( more). There are multiple potentially important variations on the types of welfare ( more). Acknowledgements Thanks to Brian Tomasik, Derek Shiller and Bob Fischer for feedback. All errors are my own. The four types It appears to me that subjective welfare - welfare whose value depends only or primarily[1] on the perspectives or mental states of those who hold them - can be roughly categorized into one of the following four types based on how they are realized: hedonic states, felt desires, belief-like preferences and choice-based preferences. To summarize, there's welfare as feelings (hedonic states and felt desires), welfare as beliefs about value (belief-like preferences) and welfare as choices (choice-based preferences). I will define, illustrate and elaborate on these types below. For some discussion of my choices of terminology, see the following footnote.[2] Hedonic states Hedonic states: feeling good and feeling bad, or (conscious) pleasure and unpleasantness/unpleasure/displeasure,[3] or (conscious) positive and negative affect. Their causes can be physical, like sensory pleasures and physical pain, or psychological, like achievement, failure, loss, shame, humour and threats, to name a few. It's unclear if interpersonal comparisons of hedonic state can be grounded in general, whether or not they can be between beings who realize them in sufficiently similar ways. In my view, the most promising approaches would be on the basis of the magnitudes of immediate and necessary cognitive or mental effects, causes or components of hedonic states. Other measures seem logically and intuitively dissociable (e.g. see the section on dissociation below) or incompatible with functionalism at the right level of abstraction (e.g. against using the absolute number of active neurons, see Mathers, 2022 and Shriver, 2022). Felt desires Felt desires: desires we feel. They can be one of two types, either a) appetitive - or incentive and typically conducive to approach or consummatory behaviour and towards things - like in attraction, hunger and anger, or b) aversive - and typically conducive to avoidance and away from things - like in pain, fear, disgust and again anger ( Hayes et al., 2014, Berridge, 2018, and on anger as aversive and appetitive, Carver & Harmon-Jones, 2009, Watson, 2009 and Lee & Lang, 2009). However, the actual approach/consummatory or avoidance behaviour is not necessary to experience a felt desire, and we can overcome our felt desires or be constrained from satisfying them. Potentially defining functions of felt desires could be their effects on attention and its control, as motivational salience, or incentive salience an...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Research summary: farmed yellow mealworm welfare, published by abrahamrowe on January 3, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post is a short summary of a peer-reviewed, open access publication on yellow mealworm welfare in the Journal of Insects as Food and Feed. The paper and supplemental information can be accessed here. The original paper was written by Meghan Barrett, Rebekah Keating Godfrey, Alexandra Schnell, and Bob Fischer; the research conducted in the paper was funded by Rethink Priorities. This post was written by Abraham Rowe and reviewed by Meghan Barrett. Unless cited otherwise, all information is derived from the Barrett et al. 2023 publication. Summary As of 2020, around 300 billion yellow mealworms (Tenebrio molitor) are farmed annually (though recent estimates now put this figure at over 3 trillion individuals ( Pells, 2023 )). Barrett et al. 2023 is the first publication to consider species-specific welfare concerns for farmed mealworms. The authors identify 15 current and future welfare concerns, including more pressing current concerns such as: Disease - Bacterial, fungal, protist, and viral pathogens can cause sluggishness, tissue damage, slowed growth, increased susceptibility to other diseases, and even mass-mortality events. High larval rearing densities - Density can cause a range of negative effects, including increased cannibalism and disease, higher chances of heat-related death, competition over food leading to malnutrition, and behavioral restriction near pupation. Inadequate larval nutrition - This may result from not providing enough protein in the animals' largely grains-based diet. Light use during handling - Photophobic adults and larvae may experience significant stress due to light use during handling. Slaughter methods - While we have high empirical uncertainty about the relative harms of slaughter methods, it is clear that some approaches to slaughter and depopulation on farms are more harmful than others. Future concerns that haven't yet been realized on farms include: Novel, potentially toxic, or inadequate feed substrates - Polymers (like plastics) and mycotoxin-contaminated grains may be more likely to be used in the future. Selective breeding and genetic modification - In vertebrate animals, selective breeding has caused a large number of welfare issues. The same might be expected to become true for mealworms. Current rearing and slaughter practices Yellow mealworms are the larval instars of a species of darkling beetle, Tenebrio molitor. Larvae go through a number of molts prior to pupation, which can take between a few months to two years depending on nutrition and abiotic conditions. Mealworms take up to 20 days to pupate. After pupating, the emerged adult beetles will mate within 3-5 days. Mealworms are a popular insect to farm for food due to their rapid growth, high nutrient content, and ease of handling. Adults are typically only used for breeding, while large larvae are sold as food and feed. Mealworms typically consume decaying grains, but have been reported to eat a wide variety of other foods in certain circumstances (including dead insects, other mealworms, and decaying wood). In farmed conditions, larval mealworms are fed a diet of 70%-85% cereals and other carbohydrates, and may be provided with supplementary protein, fruit, or vegetables. Mealworms are reared in stackable crates, usually with screened bottoms to allow frass (insect excrement) to fall through and not accumulate. Mealworms may be reared in up to 24-hour darkness, as they are photophobic. Insects bound for slaughter are collected at around 100 mg. Prior to slaughter, insects are sieved out of the substrate, washed (to remove frass and other waste from the exterior surface of their bodies), and prevented from eating for up to two days (ca...

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which writer and occasional broadcaster Tim Worthington talks to a guest about some of the things that they remember that nobody else ever seems to.This time, in a special festive edition, Tim, Bob Fischer and Georgy Jamieson are all crowding into a paper chain-strewn local radio studio ready to take your calls and chat about some of the signs that Christmas was coming that you just don't seem to get any more. So that's Sleigh Ride by Leroy Anderson being used to back every single local news feature, School Christmas Fairs, weird decorations that were still in use long past their cultural sell-by date, Advent Calendars with no chocolate but plenty of pictures of Shepherds sort of leaning sideways a bit, the toy pages in 'The Catalogue', the bitter rivalry between the Christmas double issues of Radio Times and TV Times, Channel 4 flinging out angular festive fare like Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, festive replacements for the BBC Globe, The Middlesborough Methodist Tableau and much more besides. In a crammed Christmas Cracker of chat we'll be debating the physics of those big televisions with shutters on them, stressing the need for a Loose Cannon reconstruction of Bob's drawing of a Lord 'a'Leaping', attempting to beat Carol Vorderman at Yuletide Maths, deploring the steady stream of one-shoed shoplifters hopping out of Bobby Cannon's, refuting any and every suggestion that clowns have any business being anywhere near anything to do with Christmas, exploring the financial potential of an Advent Calendar with Willie Rushton behind every single door and querying the value of using Rentaghost as a sort of all-purpose philosophical yardstick. Call in and donate some 'Canned Goods' now!You can find more editions of Looks Unfamiliar at http://timworthington.org/. You can also find Bob on Looks Unfamiliar chatting about The Tom O'Connor Roadshow, Giant Hogweed, Can't Get A Ticket (For The World Cup) by Peter Dean, Glee Bars, J. Edward Oliver's ‘Abolish Tuesdays' and How To Be A Wally here, Eighties ‘Tabloid Celebrities', Accidentally Kelly Street by Frente!, The Two Ronnies' ‘Mileaway', Rude Food, Suggs On Saturday and School Folk Songs here and  Tucker's Luck, Pookiesnackenburger, We Wanna Be Famous by Buster Gobsmack And Eats Filth', game show contestants' occupations being booed by the studio audience and the lost ancient art of the paper plate and shaving foam Custard Pie here, and Georgy on Indoor League, Re-Joyce!, the The Animals In The Box sketch, the Paul Squire Fan Club, Pippa Dolls, Pig In The Middle and Good Winter Telly here.If you enjoy Looks Unfamiliar, you can help to support the show by buying us a coffee here. If the 'Chocolate Train' calls at your stop you get a Mocha. Sorry, it's the rules.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Risk Aversion in Wild Animal Welfare, published by Rethink Priorities on December 14, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Executive Summary Wild animals outnumber humans and captive animals by orders of magnitude. Hence, scalable interventions to improve the welfare of wild animals could have greater expected value than interventions on behalf of other groups. Yet, wild animals receive only a small share of resources earmarked for animal welfare causes. This may be because animal advocates are uncomfortable with relying on expected value maximization alone in a field beset by "complex cluelessness": There are compelling reasons for and against wild animal interventions, and none are clearly decisive. Reducing populations of fast life history strategists would likely reduce suffering. However, there is also reason to suspect fast life history strategists have enough rewarding experiences to increase aggregate welfare. Eliminating fundamental sources of suffering in natural habitats would reduce suffering. However, it could also differentially benefit species that many people believe have systematically worse lives. Prioritizing the most abundant groups of wild animals could generate the largest increases in aggregate welfare. However, the most abundant wild animals have relatively low and vague probabilities of sentience. Regardless of risk attitudes, inaction on wild animal welfare is difficult to justify. There are no areas of animal welfare with a larger scale. Even if the aggregate welfare of wild animals is net-positive, it is nevertheless almost uncertainly suboptimal. By accounting for considerations that decision-makers believe are relevant, incorporating risk aversion into expected value calculations may increase willingness to commit resources to wild animal welfare. Different types of risk aversion account for different types of uncertainty. Outcome risk aversion gives special consideration to avoiding worst-case scenarios. Difference-making risk aversion gives special consideration to ensuring that actions improve upon the status quo. Ambiguity aversion gives special consideration to reducing ignorance and choosing actions that have predictable outcomes. Different types of risk often disagree in their recommendations. A corollary is that robustness across different types of risk aversion increases choiceworthiness. Interventions that reduce suffering without altering the number or composition of wild animals have a greater probability of robustness to different types of risk aversion. Outcome risk aversion favors abundant groups of wild animals, while difference-making risk aversion favors wild animals who have a high probability of sentience. Ambiguity aversion is favorable towards research on wild animal welfare, whereas outcome and difference-making risk aversion only favor it under certain conditions. Risk aversion does not robustly favor farmed over wild animals or vice versa. Outcome risk aversion prioritizes wild animals due to their abundance. Difference-making risk aversion favors farmed animals. However, it also favors some diversification across types of animals. Ambiguity aversion favors helping farmed animals over wild animals, and basic research to help both groups. Although complex cluelessness affects many domains, wild animal welfare may be a particularly high-stakes example of it. Alternatively, moral uncertainty about the permissibility of interfering with nature may explain a reluctance to act on uncertain evidence. Read the full report on Rethink Priorities' website or download the pdf. Acknowledgments The post was written by William McAuliffe. Thanks to Hayley Clatterbuck, Neil Dullaghan, Daniela Waldhorn, Bob Fischer, and Ben Stevenson for helpful feedback. The post is a project of Rethink Priorities, a global priority think-and-d...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rethink's CURVE Sequence - The Good and the Gaps, published by Jack Malde on November 28, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. (Also posted to my substack The Ethical Economist: a blog covering Economics, Ethics and Effective Altruism.) Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigation Team recently published their CURVE Sequence: "Causes and Uncertainty: Rethinking Value in Expectation." The aim of the sequence was to: Consider alternatives to expected value maximization (EVM) for cause prioritization, motivated by some unintuitive consequences of EVM. The alternatives considered were incorporating risk aversion, and contractualism. Explore the practical implications of a commitment to EVM and, in particular, if it supports prioritizing existential risk (x-risk) mitigation over all else. I found the sequence thought-provoking. It opened my eyes to the fact that x-risk mitigation may only be astronomically valuable under certain contentious conditions. I still prefer risk-neutral EVM (with some reasonable uncertainty), but am now less certain that this clearly implies a focus on prioritizing x-risk mitigation. Having said that, the sequence wasn't conclusive and it would take more research for me to determine that x-risk reduction shouldn't be the top priority for the EA community. This post summarizes some of my reflections on the sequence. Summary of posts in the sequence In Causes and Uncertainty: Rethinking Value in Expectation, Bob Fischer introduces the sequence. The motivation for considering alternatives to EVM is due to the unintuitive consequence of the theory that the highest EV option needn't be one where success is at all likely. In If Contractualism, Then AMF, Bob Fischer considers contractualism as an alternative to EVM. Under contractualism, the surest global health and development (GHD) work beats out x-risk mitigation and most animal welfare work, even if the latter options have higher EV. In How Can Risk Aversion Affect Your Cause Prioritization?, Laura Duffy considers how different risk attitudes affect cause prioritization. The results are complex and nuanced, but one key finding is that spending on corporate cage-free campaigns for egg-laying hens is robustly cost-effective under nearly all reasonable types and levels of risk aversion considered. Otherwise, prioritization depends on type and level of risk aversion. In How bad would human extinction be?, Arvo Muñoz Morán investigates the value of x-risk mitigation efforts under different risk assumptions. The persistence of an x-risk intervention - the risk mitigation's duration - plays a key role in determining how valuable the intervention is. The rate of value growth is also pivotal, with only cubic and logistic growth (which may be achieved through interplanetary expansion) giving astronomical value to x-risk mitigation. In Charting the precipice: The time of perils and prioritizing x-risk, David Rhys Bernard considers various premises underlying the time of perils hypothesis which may be pivotal to the case for x-risk mitigation. All the premises are controversial to varying degrees so it seems reasonable to assign a low credence to this version of the time of perils. Justifying x-risk mitigation based on the time of perils hypothesis may require being fanatical. In Uncertainty over time and Bayesian updating, David Rhys Bernard estimates how quickly uncertainty about the impact of an intervention increases as the time horizon of the prediction increases. He shows that a Bayesian should put decreasing weight on longer-term estimates. Importantly, he uses data from various development economics randomized controlled trials, and it is unclear to me how much the conclusions might generalize to other interventions. In The Risks and Rewards of Prioritizing Animals of Uncertain Sentience, Hayley Clutte...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 2023 EA conference talks are now live, published by Eli Nathan on November 28, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Recordings from various 2023 EA conferences are now live on our YouTube channel . These include talks from EAG Bay Area, EAG London, EAG Boston, EAGxLatAm, EAGxIndia, EAGxNordics, and EAGxBerlin (alongside many other talks from previous years). In an effort to cut costs, this year some of our conferences had fewer recorded talks than normal, though we still managed to record over 100 talks across the year. This year also involved some of our first Spanish-language content, recorded at EAGxLatAm in Mexico City. Listening to talks can be a great way to learn more about EA and stay up to date on EA cause areas, and recording them allows people who couldn't attend (or who were busy in 1:1 meetings) to watch them in their own time. Some highlighted talks are displayed below: EA Global: Bay Area Discovering AI Risks with AIs | Ethan Perez In this talk Ethan presents on how AI systems like ChatGPT can be used to help uncover potential risks in other AI systems, such as tendencies towards power-seeking, self-preservation, and sycophancy. How to compare welfare across species | Bob Fischer People farm a lot of pigs. They farm even more chickens. And if they don't already, they're soon to farm even more black soldier flies. How should EAs distribute their resources to address these problems? And how should EAs compare benefits to animals with benefits to humans? This talk outlines a framework for answering these questions. Bob Fischer argues that we should use estimates of animals' welfare ranges to compare how much good different interventions can accomplish. He also suggests some tentative welfare range estimates for several farmed species. EA Global: London Taking happiness seriously: Can we? Should we? A debate | Michael Plant, Mark Fabian Effective altruism is driven by the pursuit to maximize impact. But what counts as impact? One approach is to focus directly on improving people's happiness - how they feel during and about their lives. In this session, Michael Plant and Mark Fabian discuss how and whether to do this, and what it might mean for doing good differently. Michael starts by presenting the positive case - why happiness matters and how it can be measured - then shares the Happier Lives Institute's recent research on the implications and suggesting directions for future work. Mark Fabian acts as a critical discussant and highlights key weaknesses and challenges with 'taking happiness seriously'. After their exchange, these issues open up to the floor. Panel on nuclear risk | Rear Admiral John Gower, Patricia Lewis, Paul Ingram This panel joins together Rear Admiral John Gower, Patricia Lewis, and Paul Ingram for a panel on a conversation exploring the future of arms control, managing nuclear tensions with Russia, China's changing nuclear strategy, and more. EA Global: Boston Opening session: Thoughts from the community | Arden Koehler, Lizka Vaintrob, Kuhan Jeyapragasan In this opening session, hear talks from three community members (Lizka Vaintrob, Kuhan Jeyapragasan, and Arden Koehler) as they give some thoughts on EA and the current state of the community. Screening all DNA synthesis and reliably detecting stealth pandemics | Kevin Esvelt Pandemic security aims to safeguard the future of civilisation from exponentially spreading biological threats. In this talk, Kevin outlines two distinct scenarios - "Wildfire" and "Stealth" - by which pandemic-causing pathogens could cause societal collapse. He then explains the 'Delay, Detect, Defend' plan to prevent such pandemics, including the key technological programmes his team oversees to mitigate pandemic risk: a DNA synthesis screening system that prevents malicious actors from synthesizing and rel...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Economics of Animal Welfare: Call for Abstracts, published by Bob Fischer on November 16, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Brown University's Department of Economics and Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics are hosting an interdisciplinary conference on the economics of animal welfare on July 11-12, 2024. This conference aims to build on successful workshops on this topic at Duke University, Stanford University, and the Paris School of Economics. We welcome submissions on a range of topics that apply economic methods to understand how to value or improve animal welfare. This includes theoretical work on including losses or benefits to animals in economic analyses, applied empirical work on the effects of policies or industry structure on animal welfare, and anything else within the purview of economics as it relates to the well-being of commodity, companion, or wild animals. We invite 300-word abstracts from economists and those in relevant fields, including animal welfare science, political science, and philosophy. In addition to full presentations, we also welcome "ideas in development" from graduate students or early-stage researchers that can be presented in less than 10 minutes. Please submit abstracts and ideas-in-progress by January 15, 2024 via this form. General attendance registration will open in January 2024. Travel support to Providence will be provided for all accepted speakers. A limited number of travel bursaries are available for graduate students and predoctoral researchers to attend without presenting a paper. Please apply for non-speaker travel funding in the link above. Vegan meals will be provided. While this is an in-person event, a limited number of remote presentations may be possible. ORGANIZED BY: Bob Fischer, Department of Philosophy, Texas State University Anya Marchenko, Department of Economics, Brown University Kevin Kuruc, Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

"Fred Harris haunted my nightmares!" This time Bob Fischer of the Haunted Generation joins us to talk about subjects such as 'Doctor Who', 'The Box Of Delights', 'The Paper Lads' and that weird feeling of melancholy familiar to those growing up in the 70s and 80s... Bob's website may be found at https://hauntedgeneration.co.uk/ 'Round The Archives In Conversation' Episode 20 stars Bob Fischer, Lisa Parker and Andrew Trowbridge. The music was by Dan Tate and Paul Chandler. The cover art was by Martin Holmes. 'Round The Archives' is produced by Andrew Trowbridge and Lisa Parker.

This is a collection of highlights from Looks Unfamiliar featuring Georgy Jamieson on Indoor League, Nina Buckley on Murun Buchstansangur, Rose Ruane on Poochie, Bibi Lynch on Head Over Heels In Love by Kevin Keegan, Bob Fischer on Tucker's Luck and Gabby Hutchinson Crouch on Wella Toners And Shaders. Along the way we'll be querying when International Murun's Day is, finding out why The Get-Along Gang should never be given the vote, looking back on Richie Manic's 'Poochie' Phase, listening to a polite King Kurt and giving out fashion tips for anyone who wants to either look like a low budget Phyllis Off Coronation Street or get a Non-Copyright ‘The Rachel'. Plus you can also hear Tim on BBC 6Music talking to Stuart Maconie about Music Time and BBC Test Card F, and joining Back To Now to enthuse ever so slightly over Clouds Across The Moon by The RAH Band...You can find more editions of Looks Unfamiliar at http://timworthington.org/.If you enjoy Looks Unfamiliar, you can help to support the show by buying us a coffee here. Don't ask the Intergalactic Operator for it though. He'll probably lose connection with the vending machine halfway through.

"Happens to all of us y'know... being born." Between 1970 and 1975 Peter Sellers made films which mostly fell flat commercially, and some of which didn't even get released, but there was the odd little gem and The Optimists of Nine Elms, directed by Anthony Simmons and based on his novel, is perhaps one of Sellers' most personal films. The task of embodying Sam, a washed-up old music hall entertainer, prompted Sellers to channel both his father and his great hero Dan Leno and look back to his youth, trailing around theatre after theatre with his parents, soaking up the patter and the hoary old routines, the songs and the stagecraft. Joining Tyler this week is writer and presenter Bob Fischer to talk about the film, released exactly 50 years ago. It centres around Sam, who is reluctantly befriended by two children seeking a distraction from boredom. With their parents both too busy working to give the children much in the way of attention, by contrast Sam has all the time in the world to keep the children occupied and entertained in his own slightly irascible fashion. The three, along with Sam's beloved dog Bella, form such an unusual bond that occasionally you are left wondering who are the children and who is the adult. Shot through with some great songs and a terrific score by George Martin, plus really great performances by the young actors and Sellers, not to mention the ever reliable and slightly shifty David Daker, The Optimists of Nine Elms is well worth a watch - a sweetly melancholy tip of the hat to an entertainment tradition that had all but passed from memory, as well as showing the last knockings of London's slum culture and the general post-war malaise. As well as talking about the film Bob & Tyler's chat includes a whole bunch of conversational diversions, taking in the Simon Park Orchestra; Behind the Fridge; Tucker's Luck; Bowie; Boon; Cheggers AKA 'Passion in Pants'; The Ladykillers; The Ballad of Sam Hall; Fulham FC; Coronation Street and much much more!

This post is a part of Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigations Team's CURVE Sequence: “Causes and Uncertainty: Rethinking Value in Expectation.” The aim of this sequence is twofold: first, to consider alternatives to expected value maximization for cause prioritization; second, to evaluate the claim that a commitment to expected value maximization robustly supports the conclusion that we ought to prioritize existential risk mitigation over all else.SummaryExpected value (EV) maximization is a common method for making decisions across different cause areas. The EV of an action is an average of the possible outcomes of that action, weighted by the probability of those outcomes occurring if the action is performed.When comparing actions that would benefit different species (e.g., malaria prevention for humans, cage-free campaigns for chickens, stunning operations in shrimp farms), calculating EV includes assessing the probability that the individuals it affects are sentient.Small invertebrates, like shrimp and insects, have relatively low probabilities [...] ---Outline:(04:12) 1. Introduction(07:13) 2. Results of EV maximization(10:33) 3. Dissatisfaction with results of EV maximization(14:57) 4. Risk(16:25) 5. Risk aversion as avoiding worst case outcomes(16:30) 5.1. Risk aversion about outcomes(18:22) 5.2. A formal model of risk aversion about outcomes(21:45) 6. Risk aversion as avoiding inefficacy(22:12) 6.1. Difference-making risk aversion(23:45) 6.2. The risk of wasting money on non-sentient creatures(27:10) 6.3. Is difference-making risk aversion rational?(29:10) 6.4. A formal model of difference-making risk aversion(32:51) 7. Risk as avoiding ambiguity(40:19) 8. What about chickens?(45:01) 9. Conclusions(47:19) AcknowledgmentsThe original text contained 34 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 16th, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HMakzketADQq4bkvD/the-risks-and-rewards-of-prioritizing-animals-of-uncertain --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: "Dimensions of Pain" workshop: Summary and updated conclusions, published by Rethink Priorities on August 21, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Executive Summary Background: The workshop's goal was to leverage expertise in pain to identify strategies for testing whether severity or duration looms larger in the overall badness of negatively valenced experiences. The discussion was focused on how to compare welfare threats to farmed animals. No gold standard behavioral measures: Although attendees did not express confidence in any single paradigm, several felt that triangulating results across several paradigms would increase clarity about whether nonhuman animals are more averse to severe pains or long-lasting pains. Consistent results across different methodologies only strengthens a conclusion if they have uncorrelated or opposing biases. Fortunately, while classical conditioning approaches are probably biased towards severity mattering more, operant conditioning approaches are probably biased towards duration mattering more. Unfortunately, the biases might be too large to produce convergent results. Behavioral experiments may lack external validity: Attendees believed that a realistic experiment would not involve pains of the magnitude that characterize the worst problems farmed animals endure. Thus, instead of prioritizing external validity, we recommend whatever study designs create the largest differences in severity. Studies of laboratory animals and (especially) humans seem more likely to generate large differences in severity than studies of farmed animals. No gold standard biomarkers: Biomarkers could elide the biases that behavioral and self-report data inevitably introduce. However, attendees argued that there are no currently known biomarkers that could serve as an aggregate measure of pain experience over the course of a lifetime. Priors should favor prioritizing duration: Attendees had competing ideas about how to prioritize between severity and duration in the absence of compelling empirical evidence. In cases where long-lasting harms are at least thousands of times longer than more severe harms and are of at least moderate severity, we favor a presumption that long-lasting pains cause more disutility overall. Nevertheless, due to empirical and moral uncertainty, we would recommend putting some credence (~20%) in the most severe harms causing farmed animals at least as much disutility as the longest-lasting harms they experience. Background The Dimensions of Pain workshop was held April 27-28, 2023 at University of British Columbia. Attendees included animal welfare scientists (viz., Dan Weary, Thomas Ede, Leonie Jacobs, Ben Lecorps, Cynthia Schuck, Wladimir Alonso, and Michelle Lavery), pain scientists (Jeff Mogil, Gregory Corder, Fiona Moultrie, Brent Vogt), and philosophers (Bob Fischer, Murat Aydede, Walter Veit). William McAuliffe and Adam Shriver, the authors of this report, guided the discussion. Funders who want to cost-effectively improve animal welfare have to decide whether attenuating brief, severe pains (e.g., live-shackle slaughter) or chronic, milder pains (e.g., lameness) reduces more suffering overall. Farmers also face similar tradeoffs when deciding between multiple methods for achieving the same goal (e.g., single-stage versus multi-stage stunning). Our original report exploring the considerations that would favor prioritizing one dimension over another, The Relative Importance of the Severity and Duration of Pain, identified barriers to designing experiments that would provide clear-cut empirical evidence. The goal of the workshop was to ascertain whether an interdisciplinary group of experts could overcome these issues. No gold standard behavioral measures We spent one portion of the workshop reviewing some of the confounds th...

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which writer and occasional broadcaster Tim Worthington talks to a guest about some of the things that they remember that nobody else ever seems to.Joining Tim this time is broadcaster and writer Bob Fischer, who's roaming the streets doing vox pops asking if anyone remembers Grange Hill spinoff Tucker's Luck, post-punk bin-clatterers Pookiesnackenburger, We Wanna Be Famous by Buster Gobsmack And Eats Filth who are not in any way the That's Life! team in disguise as 'punks', game show contestants' occupations being booed by the studio audience and the lost ancient art of the paper plate and shaving foam Custard Pie. Along the way we'll be meeting a Trade Union Uncle Fester, listening to a Polite King Kurt, trying to avoid being scammed by a Sicilian Jeremy Corbyn and a Blue Diana Dors, watching Jack Rosenthal's Play Your Cards Right, and debating whether Pearl Jam would have been improved by a well-timed plate of shaving foam in Eddie Vedder's face.You can find more editions of Looks Unfamiliar at http://timworthington.org/. You can also find Bob on Looks Unfamiliar talking about  The Tom O'Connor Roadshow, Giant Hogweed, Can't Get A Ticket (For The World Cup) by Peter Dean, Glee Bars, J. Edward Oliver's ‘Abolish Tuesdays' and How To Be A Wally here and Eighties ‘Tabloid Celebrities', Accidentally Kelly Street by Frente!, The Two Ronnies' ‘Mileaway', Rude Food, Suggs On Saturday and School Folk Songs here.If you enjoy Looks Unfamiliar, you can help to support the show by buying us a coffee here. Although if you're Alan from Tucker's Luck, you probably haven't got enough ten pences for one.There's more about the weird world of BBC Records And Tapes in Top Of The Box, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigation Team: Introductions and Next Steps, published by Bob Fischer on June 21, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Some months ago, Rethink Priorities announced its interdisciplinary Worldview Investigation Team (WIT). Now, we're pleased to introduce the team's members: Bob Fischer is a Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University, and the Director of the Society for the Study of Ethics & Animals. Before leading WIT, he ran RP's Moral Weight Project. Laura Duffy is an Executive Research Coordinator for Co-CEO Marcus Davis and works on the Worldview Investigations Project. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Statistics and co-facilitated UChicago Effective Altruism's Introductory Fellowship. Arvo Muñoz Morán is a Quantitative Researcher working on the Worldview Investigations Team at Rethink Priorities and a research assistant at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute. Before that, he was a Research Analyst at the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research and earned an MPhil in Economics from Oxford. His background is in mathematics and philosophy. Hayley Clatterbuck is a Philosophy Researcher at Rethink Priorities and an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published on topics in probability, evolutionary biology, and animal minds. Derek Shiller is a Philosophy Researcher at Rethink Priorities. He has a PhD in philosophy and has written on topics in metaethics, consciousness, and the philosophy of probability. Before joining Rethink Priorities, Derek worked as the lead web developer for The Humane League. David Bernard is a Quantitative Researcher at Rethink Priorities. He will soon complete his PhD in economics at the Paris School of Economics, where his research focuses on forecasting and causal inference in the short and long-run. He was a Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley and a Global Priorities fellow at the Global Priorities Institute. Over the next few months, the team will be working on cause prioritization—a topic that raises hard normative, metanormative, decision-theoretic, and empirical issues. We aren't going to resolve them anytime soon. So, we need to decide how to navigate a sea of open questions. In part, this involves making our assumptions explicit, producing the best models we can, and then conducting sensitivity analyses to determine both how robust our models are to uncertainty and where the value of information lies. Accordingly, WIT's goal is to make several contributions to the broader conversation about global priorities. Among the planned contributions, you can expect: A cross-cause cost-effectiveness model. This tool will allow users to compare interventions like corporate animal welfare campaigns with work on AI safety, the Against Malaria Foundation with attempts to reduce the risk of nuclear war, biosecurity projects with community building, and so on. We've been working on a draft of this model in recent months and we recently hired two programmers—Chase Carter and Agustín Covarrubias—to accelerate its public release. While this tool won't resolve all disputes about resource allocation, we hope it will help the community reason more transparently about these issues. Surveys of key stakeholders about the inputs to the model. Many people have thought long and hard about how much x-risk certain interventions can reduce, the relative importance of improving human and animal welfare, and the cost of saving lives in developing countries. We want to capture and distill those insights. A series of reports on the cruxes. The model has three key cruxes: animals' “moral weights,” the expected value of the future, and your preference for ...

Some months ago, Rethink Priorities announced its interdisciplinary Worldview Investigation Team (WIT). Now, we're pleased to introduce the team's members:Bob Fischer is a Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University, and the Director of the Society for the Study of Ethics & Animals. Before leading WIT, he ran RP's Moral Weight Project.Laura Duffy is an Executive Research Coordinator for Co-CEO Marcus Davis and works on the Worldview Investigations Project. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Statistics and co-facilitated UChicago Effective Altruism's Introductory Fellowship.Arvo Muñoz Morán is a Quantitative Researcher working on the Worldview Investigations Team at Rethink Priorities and a research assistant at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute. Before that, he was a Research Analyst at the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research and earned an MPhil in Economics from Oxford. His background is in mathematics and philosophy.Hayley Clatterbuck is a Philosophy Researcher at Rethink Priorities and an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published on topics in probability, evolutionary biology, and animal minds. Derek Shiller is a Philosophy Researcher at Rethink Priorities. He has a PhD in philosophy and has written on topics in metaethics, consciousness, and the philosophy of probability. Before joining Rethink Priorities, Derek worked as the lead web developer for The Humane League.David Bernard is a Quantitative Researcher at Rethink Priorities. He will soon complete his PhD in economics at the Paris School of Economics, where his research focuses on forecasting and causal inference in the short and long-run. He was a Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley and a Global Priorities fellow at the Global Priorities Institute. Over the next few months, the team will be working on cause prioritization—a topic that raises hard normative, metanormative, decision-theoretic, and empirical issues. We aren't going to resolve them anytime soon. So, we need to decide how to navigate a sea of open questions. In part, this involves making our assumptions explicit, producing the best models we can, and then conducting sensitivity analyses to determine both how robust our models are to uncertainty and where the value of information lies.Accordingly, WIT's goal is to make several contributions to the broader conversation about global priorities. Among the planned contributions, you can expect:A cross-cause cost-effectiveness model. This tool will allow users to compare interventions like corporate animal welfare campaigns with work on AI safety, the Against Malaria Foundation with attempts to reduce the risk of nuclear war, biosecurity projects with community building, and so on. We've been working on a draft of this model in recent months and we recently hired two programmers to accelerate its public release. While this tool won't resolve all disputes about resource allocation, we hope it will help the community reason more transparently about these issues.Surveys of key stakeholders about the inputs to the model. Many people have thought long and hard about how much x-risk certain interventions can reduce, the relative importance of improving human and [...]--- First published: June 21st, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kSrjdtazFhkwwLuK8/rethink-priorities-worldview-investigation-team --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. Share feedback on this narration.

When it comes to thinking about animals, Bob Fischer believes we should be doing it more often and more deeply. A professor of philosophy at Texas State University and the author of, among other things, Animal Ethics—A Contemporary Introduction, Bob joins the podcast this week for a conversation about animal ethics, philosophy, and activism. Bob shares how empirical data and philosophical…

"The fascist junta of the potato people" Back in the distant mists of time, when Ian first dreamt up the idea of getting Danny and I to read through all the Smegazines and record a podcast series about it, no doubt issues like this were front and centre of his mind. Historically significant pieces on ancient DJs? Check. Some hot Wraggy action? Check. Potatits? You bet ya. *gestures vaguely at insane original comic strips*? Uh-huh. Needless to say, this was a fun one.Show notes Danny's brother on Bad Influence - he's the one fist-pumping on the right of frame after the pool shot. Wiffle Lever To Full by Bob Fischer is the book in which Cappsy is carried off on the shoulders of his fellow Red Dwarf fans. The Angel Hotel in Northampton was somewhat bigger and grander than our initial research suggested. It burnt down in 2012 and is currently being redeveloped. Clip from Parallel 9 with Robert and Craig. A good blog about the making of Parallel 9. The Abso-smegging-lutely Unofficial Red Dwarf Cookbook. Ian looking discerningly at a bowl of gazpacho soup. Flap Jack's comprehensive guide to the edits made in the Omnibus. G&TV: The Reconstructed Heart. Brian Harvey vs baked potatoes. G&T's 2004 interview with Peter Tyler. Seb Patrick's Beyond The Touchline podcast on Roy of the Rovers and other football comics.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Scale of the welfare of various animal populations, published by Vasco Grilo on March 19, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary I Fermi-estimated the scale of the welfare of various animal populations from the relative intensity of their experiences, moral weight, and population size. Based on my results, I would be very surprised if the scale of the welfare of: Wild animals ended up being smaller than that of farmed animals. Farmed animals turned out to be smaller than that of humans. Introduction If it is worth doing, it is worth doing with made-up statistics? Methods I Fermi-estimated the scale of the welfare of various animal populations from the absolute value of the expected total hedonistic utility (ETHU). I computed this from the product between: Intensity of the mean experience as a fraction of that of the worst possible experience. Mean moral weight. Population size. The data and calculations are here. Intensity of experience I defined the intensity of the mean experience as a fraction of that of the worst possible experience based on the types of pain defined by the Welfare Footprint Project (WFP) here (search for “definitions”). I assumed: The following correspondence between the various types of pain (I encourage you to check this post from algekalipso, and this from Ren Springlea to get a sense of why I think the intensity can vary so much): Excruciating pain, which I consider the worst possible experience, is 1 k times as bad as disabling pain. Disabling pain is 100 times as bad as hurtful pain, which together with the above implies excruciating pain being 100 k times as bad as hurtful pain. Hurtful pain is 10 times as bad as annoying pain, which together with the above implies excruciating pain being 1 M times as bad as annoying pain. The intensity of the mean experience of: Farmed animal populations is as high as that of broiler chickens in reformed scenarios. I assessed this from the time broilers experience each type of pain according to these data from WFP (search for “pain-tracks”), and supposing: The rest of their time is neutral. Their lifespan is 42 days, in agreement with section “Conventional and Reformed Scenarios” of Chapter 1 of Quantifying pain in broiler chickens by Cynthia Schuck-Paim and Wladimir Alonso. Humans and other non-farmed animal populations is as high as 2/3 of that of hurtful pain. 2/3 (= 16/24) such that 1 day (24 h) of such intensity is equivalent to 16 h spent in hurtful pain plus 8 h in neutral sleeping. Ideally, I would have used empirical data for the animal populations besides farmed chickens too. However, I do not think they are readily available, so I had to make some assumptions. In general, I believe the sign of the mean experience is: For farmed animal populations, negative, judging from the research of WFP on chickens. For humans, positive (see here). For other non-farmed animal populations, positive or negative (see this preprint from Heather Browning and Walter Weit). Moral weight I defined the mean moral weight from Rethink Priorities' median estimates for mature individuals provided here by Bob Fischer. For the populations I studied with animals of different species, I used those of: For wild mammals, pigs. For farmed fish, salmon. For wild fish, salmon. For farmed insects, silkworms. For wild terrestrial arthropods, silkworms. For farmed crayfish, crabs and lobsters, mean between crayfish and crabs. For farmed shrimps and prawns, shrimps. For wild marine arthropods, silkworms. For nematodes, silkworms multiplied by 0.1. Population size I defined the population size from: For humans, these data from Our World in Data (OWID) (for 2021). For wild mammals, the mean of the lower and upper bounds provided in section 3.1.5.2 of Carlier 2020. For farmed chickens and pigs, these data from OWID (for 2014). F...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Animal Welfare - 6 Months in 6 Minutes, published by Zoe Williams on February 8, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In August 2022, I started making summaries of the top EA and LW forum posts each week. This post collates together the key themes I've seen within top-rated animal welfare posts since then. (Note a lot of good work is happening outside what's posted on the forum too! This post doesn't try to cover that work.) If you're interested in staying up to date on a more regular basis, consider subscribing to the Weekly EA & LW Forum Summaries, or to the Animal Advocacy Biweekly Digest. Forum announcements here and here. And for a great overview of the good the community is doing in this space, I highly recommend reading Big Wins for Farm Animals This Decade by Lewis Bollard. Key Takeaways A multi-proxy method has been suggested as a better option than neuron counts for estimating the moral weights of different species, with a first stab completed by Rethink Priorities based on empirical and philosophical research. There is an increasing focus on small animal welfare eg. fish, crustaceans and insects. This is particularly relevant for interventions which may cause substitution effects (consumers moving from one form of animal product to another). Wild animal welfare is becoming a more established cause area, with recent launches including WildAnimalSuffering.org and the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program. Several major policy wins were achieved, including the first FDA approval of cultivated meat, and an EU announcement that it would put forward a proposal to end the systematic killing of male chicks. Themes Cross-Species Comparisons Moving beyond neuron counts Big strides have been made in modeling cross-species welfare comparisons. Rethink Priorities published the Moral Weight Project Sequence (led by Bob Fischer), which tackles philosophical and empirical questions related to the relative welfare capacities of 11 different farmed animals. This included looking at the evidence for 90 different hedonic and cognitive proxies in those animals, discussing why we shouldn't just use neuron counts, and publishing a model of relative differences in the possible intensities of these animals' pleasure and pains (relative to humans). You can see the results below - they suggest using these as the best-available placeholders until further research can be completed, and noting the translation from intensity of experience (welfare range) into ‘moral weight' is dependent on several philosophical assumptions: Other work in this area has included: The launching of the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, which will conduct and support foundational research about the nature and intrinsic value of nonhuman minds, including biological and artificial minds. There will be a special focus on invertebrates and AIs. The Shrimp Welfare Project (founded 2021) released research on using biological markers to measure the welfare of shrimp, and prioritize the practices causing the worst harms. MHR points out the issues with using neuron counts extend to the practical as well as the philosophical - the only publicly-available empirical reports of fish neuron counts sample exclusively from very small species (

Support 21st Talks on Our Patreon! Coleman spoke with Bob Fischer, a researcher at Rethink Priorities who recently worked on the Moral Weights project. In the discussion, Dr. Fischer and Coleman discussed a range of topics relating to animal ethics, including the research methodology of the team and the role that intuitions play in striving to live a moral life. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/21st-talks/support

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: If Adult Insects Matter, How Much Do Juveniles Matter?, published by Bob Fischer on February 6, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Key Takeaways There are major uncertainties about sentience, welfare ranges, and the taxa of interest that make it difficult to draw any firm conclusions. Nevertheless, it's plausible that there are some differences in the probability of sentience and welfare ranges across insect life stages. However likely it is that adult insects are sentient, it's less likely that juveniles are sentient; however much welfare adult insects can realize, juveniles can probably realize less. These differences are probably best explained by the life requirements at those stages, which vary in species-specific ways. Insofar as we can compare the magnitudes of these differences, the best evidence currently available doesn't support the conclusion that they're large. For instance, we don't see a plausible argument for the view that adult insects matter 1,000x more than juveniles. We may be able to make some predictions about the probability of sentience based on two factors: first, degrees of independence at the immature life stages; second, the developmentally-relevant details of the rearing environments. Introduction This is the ninth and final post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence. The aim of the sequence is to provide an overview of the research that Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on interspecific cause prioritization—i.e., making resource allocation decisions across species. The goal of this post is to help animal welfare grantmakers assess the relative value of improvements to the lives of some commercially-important insects: the yellow mealworm (Tenebrio molitor), black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens), western honey bee (Apis mellifera), house cricket (Acheta domesticus), and silkworm (Bombyx mori). The vast majority of yellow mealworms, black soldier flies, and silkworms do not reach adulthood in the commercial systems of interest here (the exceptions are the members of the breeding population). By contrast, honey bees and house crickets do reach adulthood. This raises the question of how to value improvements to the lives of insects in their immature versus adult life stages. If adult insects are more likely to be sentient than immature insects, then, all else equal, it's more important to prevent harm to adult insects than immature insects. Similarly, if it's likely that adult insects can suffer more intensely than immature insects (which is relevant to their respective welfare ranges, which are one dimension of their respective capacities for welfare), then, all else equal, it's more important to prevent harm to adult insects than immature insects. So, insofar as it's possible to identify differences in either the probability of sentience or welfare ranges, that information is action-relevant when all else is equal. And insofar as we can compare the magnitudes of any such differences, that information may be action-relevant when all else isn't equal. This document unfolds as follows. In the next section, we provide some relevant biological information about the taxa of interest and introduce the reader to some important dimensions of the development and neurobiology of insects. After that, we explain how Rethink Priorities tried to estimate differences in the probability of sentience and welfare ranges for other taxa—which, among other things, involves surveying the literature for evidence regarding sentience- and welfare-range-relevant traits. We extend that approach here. Then, we summarize the literature we reviewed. Next, we argue for the key takeaways. Finally, we make some suggestions regarding future work in this area. Biological Background Information Insects develop in the larval (or nymphal) stage, un...

We offer welfare range estimates for 11 farmed species: pigs, chickens, carp, salmon, octopuses, shrimp, crayfish, crabs, bees, black soldier flies, and silkworms.These estimates are, essentially, estimates of the differences in the possible intensities of these animals' pleasures and pains relative to humans' pleasures and pains. Then, we add a number of controversial (albeit plausible) philosophical assumptions (including hedonism, valence symmetry, and others discussed here) to reach conclusions about animals' welfare ranges relative to human's welfare range.Given hedonism and conditional on sentience, we think (credence: 0.7) that none of the vertebrate nonhuman animals of interest have a welfare range that's more than double the size of any of the others. While carp and salmon have lower scores than pigs and chickens, we suspect that's largely due to a lack of research.Given hedonism and conditional on sentience, we think (credence: 0.65) that the welfare ranges of humans and the vertebrate animals of interest are within an order of magnitude of one another. Given hedonism and conditional on sentience, we think (credence 0.6) that all the invertebrates of interest have welfare ranges within two orders of magnitude of the vertebrate nonhuman animals of interest. Invertebrates are so diverse and we know so little about them; hence, our caution.Our view is that the estimates we've provided should be seen as placeholders—albeit, we submit, the best such placeholders available. We're providing a starting point for more rigorous, empirically-driven research into animals' welfare ranges. At the same time, we're offering guidance for decisions that have to be made long before that research is finishedOriginal article:https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Qk3hd6PrFManj8K6o/rethink-priorities-welfare-range-estimatesNarrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.Share feedback on this narration.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Don't Balk at Animal-friendly Results, published by Bob Fischer on January 16, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Key Takeaways The Moral Weight Project assumes hedonism. It also assumes that in the absence of good direct measures of the intensities of valenced experiences, the best way to assess differences in the potential intensities of animals' valenced experiences is to look at differences in other capacities that might serve as proxies for differences in hedonic potential. Suppose that these assumptions lead to the conclusion that chickens and humans can realize roughly the same amount of welfare at any given time. Call this “the Equality Result.” The key question: Would the Equality Result alone be a good reason to think that one or both of these assumptions is mistaken? We don't think so. To explain why not, we consider three bases for skepticism about the Equality Result. Then, we consider whether the Equality Result should be surprising given hedonism. Three Bases for Skepticism First, someone might balk at the implications of the Equality Result given certain independent theses. For instance, given utilitarianism, the Equality Result probably implies that there should be a massive shift in neartermist resources toward animals, and someone might find this unbelievable. But the Equality Result isn't to blame: utilitarianism is. Second, someone might be inclined to accept some theory of welfare that does not support the Equality Result. Fair enough, but as we've argued elsewhere, that only gets you so far. Third, someone might balk at the Equality Result even given hedonism. The basic problem with this is that the anti-Equality-Result intuition is uncalibrated, uncalibrated intuitions are vulnerable to various biases, and there are some highly relevant biases in the present context. If Hedonism, Then the Equality Result Shouldn't Be Surprising We quickly consider three popular theories valenced states and argue that there are plausible assumptions on which each one leads to the Equality Result. This isn't an argument for the Equality Result. It is, however, a check against knee-jerk skepticism. Introduction This is the seventh post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence. The aim of the sequence is to provide an overview of the research that Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on interspecific cause prioritization—i.e., making resource allocation decisions across species. As EAs, we want to compare the cost-effectiveness of all interventions, including ones that benefit (sentient) animals with the cost-effectiveness of interventions that benefit humans. To do that, we need to estimate the value of each kind of animal relative to humans. If we understand each individual's value in terms of the welfare they generate, whether positive or negative, then this means we need to estimate the amount of welfare that each kind of animal realizes relative to the amount of welfare that humans realize. How should we react if our method for generating these estimates produces a surprising result? Suppose, for instance, that we make various assumptions and generate a method for estimating how much welfare animals can realize relative to how much welfare humans can realize (which is the first step toward estimating how much welfare animals actually realize). And suppose that, when applied, our method suggests that chickens and humans can realize roughly the same amount of welfare at any given time. Call this “the Equality Result.” Would getting the Equality Result itself be a reason to think we made a mistake? Let's make this concrete. The Moral Weight Project assumes hedonism—i.e., that all and only positively valenced experiences are good for you and all and only negatively valenced experiences are bad for you. Moreover, it assumes that, in the ab...

Key TakeawaysOur objective: estimate the welfare ranges of 11 farmed species.Given hedonism, an individual's welfare range is the difference between the welfare level associated with the most intense positively valenced state that the individual can realize and the welfare level associated with the most intense negatively valenced state that the individual can realize.Given some prominent theories about the functions of valenced states, we identified over 90 empirical proxies that might provide evidence of variation in the potential intensities of those states. There are many unknowns across many species.It's rare to have evidence that animals lack a given trait.We know less about the presence or absence of traits as we move from terrestrial vertebrates to most invertebrates.Many of the traits about which we know the least are affective traits.We do have information about some significant traits for many animals.Original article:https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tnSg6o7crcHFLc395/the-welfare-range-tableNarrated for the Effective Altruism Forum by TYPE III AUDIO.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Octopuses (Probably) Don't Have Nine Minds, published by Bob Fischer on December 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Key Takeaways Here are the key takeaways for the full report: Based on the split-brain condition in humans, some people have wondered whether some humans “house” multiple subjects. Based on superficial parallels between the split-brain condition and the apparent neurological structures of some animals—such as chickens and octopuses—some people have wondered whether those animals house multiple subjects too. To assign a non-negligible credence to this possibility, we'd need evidence that parts of these animals aren't just conscious, but that they have valenced conscious states (like pain), as that's what matters morally (given our project's assumptions). This evidence is difficult to get: The human case shows that unconscious mentality is powerful, so we can't infer consciousness from many behaviors. Even when we can infer consciousness, we can't necessarily infer a separate subject. After all, there are plausible interpretations of split-brain cases on which there are not separate subjects. Even if there are multiple subjects housed in an organism in some circumstances, it doesn't follow that there are always multiple subjects. These additional subjects may only be generated in contexts that are irrelevant for practical purposes. If we don't have any evidence that parts of these animals are conscious or that they have valenced conscious states, then insofar as we're committed to having an empirically-driven approach to counting subjects, we shouldn't postulate multiple subjects in these cases. That being said, the author is inclined to place up to a 0.1 credence that there are multiple subjects in the split-brain case, but no higher than 0.025 for the 1+8 model of octopuses. Introduction This is the sixth post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence. The aim of the sequence is to provide an overview of the research that Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on interspecific cause prioritization—i.e., making resource allocation decisions across species. The aim of this post, which was written by Joe Gottlieb, is to summarize his full report on the phenomenal unity and cause prioritization, which explores whether, for certain species, there are empirical reasons to posit multiple welfare subjects per organism. That report is available here. Motivations and the Bottom Line We normally assume that there is one conscious subject—or one entity who undergoes conscious experiences—per conscious animal. But perhaps this isn't always true: perhaps some animals ‘house' more than one conscious subject. If those subjects are also welfare subjects—beings with the ability to accrue welfare goods and bad—then this might matter when trying to determine whether we are allocating resources in a way that maximizes expected welfare gained per dollar spent. When we theorize about these animals' capacity for welfare, we would no longer be theorizing about a single welfare subject, but multiple such subjects.[1] In humans, people have speculated about this possibility based on “split-brain” cases, where the corpus callosum has been wholly or partially severed (e.g., Bayne 2010; Schechter 2018). Some non-human animals, like birds, approximate the split-brain condition as the norm, and others, like the octopus, exhibit a striking lack of integration and highly decentralized nervous systems, with surprising levels of peripheral autonomy. And in the case of the octopus, Peter Godfrey-Smith suggests that “[w]e should.at least consider the possibility that an octopus is a being with multiple selves”, one for central brain, and then one for each arm (2020: 148; cf. Carls-Diamante 2017, 2019, 2022). What follows is a high-level summary of my full report on...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Do Brains Contain Many Conscious Subsystems? If So, Should We Act Differently?, published by Bob Fischer on December 5, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Key Takeaways The Conscious Subsystems Hypothesis (“Conscious Subsystems,” for short) says that brains have subsystems that realize phenomenally conscious states that aren't accessible to the subjects we typically associate with those brains—namely, the ones who report their experiences to us. Given that humans' brains are likely to support more such subsystems than animals' brains, EAs who have explored Conscious Subsystems have suggested that it provides a reason for risk-neutral expected utility maximizers to assign more weight to humans relative to animals. However, even if Conscious Subsystems is true, it probably doesn't imply that risk-neutral expected utility maximizers ought to allocate neartermist dollars to humans instead of animals. There are three reasons for this: If humans have conscious subsystems, then animals probably have them too, so taking them seriously doesn't increase the expected value of, say, humans over chickens as much as we might initially suppose. Risk-neutral expected utility maximizers are committed to assumptions—including the assumption that all welfare counts equally, whoever's welfare it is—that support the conclusion that the best animal-focused neartermist interventions (e.g., cage-free campaigns) are many times better than the best human-focused neartermist interventions (e.g., bednets). Independently, note that the higher our credences in the theories of consciousness that are most friendly to Conscious Subsystems, the higher our credences ought to be in the hypothesis that many small invertebrates are sentient. So, insofar as we're risk-neutral expected utility maximizers with relatively high credences in Conscious Subsystems-friendly theories of consciousness, it's likely that we should be putting far more resources into investigating the welfare of the world's small invertebrates. We assign very low credences to claims that ostensibly support Conscious Subsystems. The appeal of the idea that standard theories of consciousness support Conscious Subsystems may be based on not distinguishing (a) theories that are just designed to make predictions about when people will self-report having conscious experiences of a certain type (which may all be wrong, but have whatever direct empirical support they have) and (b) theories that are attempts to answer the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness (which only have indirect empirical support and are far more controversial). Standard versions of functionalism say that states are conscious when they have the right relationships to sensory stimulations, other mental states, and behavior. But it's highly unlikely that many groups of neurons stand in the correct relationships, even if they perform functions that, in the abstract, seem as complex and sophisticated as those performed by whole brains. Ultimately, we do not recommend acting on Conscious Subsystems at this time. Introduction This is the fifth post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence. The aim of the sequence is to provide an overview of the research that Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on interspecific cause prioritization—i.e., making resource allocation decisions across species. The aim of this post is to assess a hypothesis that's been advanced by several members of the EA community: namely, that brains have subsystems that realize phenomenally conscious states that aren't accessible to the subjects we typically associate with those brains (i.e., the ones who report their experiences to us; see, e.g., Tomasik, 2013-2019, Shiller, 2016, Muehlhauser, 2017, Shulman, 2020, Crummett, 2022). If there are such states, then we might think that ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Theories of Welfare and Welfare Range Estimates, published by Bob Fischer on November 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Key Takeaways Many theories of welfare imply that there are probably differences in animals' welfare ranges. However, these theories do not agree about the sizes of those differences. The Moral Weight Project assumes that hedonism is true. This post tries to estimate how different our welfare range estimates could be if we were to assume some other theory of welfare. We argue that even if hedonic goods and bads (i.e., pleasures and pains) aren't all of welfare, they're a lot of it. So, probably, the choice of a theory of welfare will only have a modest (less than 10x) impact on the differences we estimate between humans' and nonhumans' welfare ranges. Introduction This is the third post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence. The aim of the sequence is to provide an overview of the research that Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on interspecific cause prioritization. The aim of this post is to suggest a way to quantify the impact of assuming hedonism on welfare range estimates. Motivations Theories of welfare disagree about the determinants of welfare. According to hedonism, the determinants of welfare are positively and negatively valenced experiences. According to desire satisfaction theory, the determinants are satisfied and frustrated desires. According to a garden variety objective list theory, the determinants are something like knowledge, developing and maintaining friendships, engaging in meaningful activities, and so on. Now, some animals probably have more intense pains than others; some probably have richer, more complex desires; some are able to acquire more sophisticated knowledge of the world; others can make stronger, more complex relationships with others. If animals systematically vary with respect to their ability to realize the determinants of welfare, then they probably vary in their welfare ranges. That is, some of them can probably realize more positive welfare at a time than others; likewise, some of them can probably realize more negative welfare at a time than others. As a result, animals probably vary with respect to the differences between the best and worst welfare states they can realize. The upshot: many theories of welfare imply that there are probably differences in animals' welfare ranges. However, theories of welfare do not obviously agree about the sizes of those differences. Consider a garden variety objective list theory on which the following things contribute positively to welfare: acting autonomously, gaining knowledge, having friends, being in a loving relationship, doing meaningful work, creating valuable institutions, experiencing pleasure, and so on. Now consider a simple version of hedonism (i.e., one that rejects the higher / lower pleasure distinction) on which just one thing contributes positively to welfare: experiencing pleasure. Presumably, while many nonhuman animals (henceforth, animals) can experience pleasure, they can't realize many of the other things that matter according to the objective list theory. Given as much, it's plausible that if the objective list theory is true, there will be larger differences in welfare ranges between many humans and animals than there will be if hedonism is true. For practical and theoretical reasons, the Moral Weight Project assumes that hedonism is true. On the practical side, we needed to make some assumptions to make any progress in the time we had available. On the theoretical side, there are powerful arguments for hedonism. Still, those who reject hedonism will rightly wonder about the impact of assuming hedonism. How different would our welfare range estimates be if we were to assume some other theory of welfare? In the ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Welfare Range Table, published by Bob Fischer on November 7, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Key Takeaways Our objective: estimate the welfare ranges of 11 farmed species. Given hedonism, an individual's welfare range is the difference between the welfare level associated with the most intense positively valenced state that the individual can realize and the welfare level associated with the most intense negatively valenced state that the individual can realize. Given some prominent theories about the functions of valenced states, we identified over 90 empirical proxies that might provide evidence of variation in the potential intensities of those states. There are many unknowns across many species. It's rare to have evidence that animals lack a given trait. We know less about the presence or absence of traits as we move from terrestrial vertebrates to most invertebrates. Many of the traits about which we know the least are affective traits. We do have information about some significant traits for many animals. Introduction This is the second post in the Moral Weight Project Sequence. The aim of the sequence is to provide an overview of the research that Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on interspecific cause prioritization—i.e., making resource allocation decisions across species. The aim of this post is to provide an overview of the Welfare Range Table, which records the results of a literature review covering over 90 empirical traits across 11 farmed species. Motivations If we want to do as much good as possible, we have to compare all the ways of doing good—including ways that involve helping members of different species. The Moral Weight Project's assumptions entail that everyone's welfare counts the same and that all welfare improvements count equally. Still, some may be able to realize more welfare than others. We're particularly interested in how much welfare different individuals can realize at a time—that is, their respective welfare ranges. An individual's welfare range is the difference between the best and worst welfare states the individual can realize at a time. We assume hedonism, according to which all and only positively valenced states increase welfare and all and only negatively valenced states decrease welfare. Given as much, an individual's welfare range is the difference between the welfare level associated with the most intense positively valenced state that the individual can realize and the welfare level associated with the most intense negatively valenced state that the individual can realize. In the case of pigs, for instance, that might be the difference between the welfare level we associate with being fully healthy on a farm sanctuary, on the one hand, and a botched slaughter, on the other. If there's variation in welfare ranges across taxa, then there's variation in the capacities that generate the determinants of welfare. So, if there's such variation and hedonism is true, then there's variation in the capacities that generate positively and negatively valenced experiences. As Jason Schukraft argues, we don't have any good direct measures of the intensity of valenced states that let us make interspecific comparisons. Indeed, we rely on indirect measures even in humans: behavior, physiological changes, and verbal reports. We can observe behavior and physiological changes in nonhumans, but most of them aren't verbal. So, we have to rely on other indirect proxies, piecing together an understanding from animals' cognitive and affective traits or capabilities. The Welfare Range Table includes over 90 such traits: some behavioral, others physiological; some more cognitive, others more affective. Then, it indicates whether the empirical literature provides reason to think that members of 11 farmed spec...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: An Introduction to the Moral Weight Project, published by Bob Fischer on October 31, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Key Takeaways Our objective: provide “moral weights” for 11 farmed species. To make this tractable, we made four assumptions: utilitarianism, hedonism, valence symmetry, and unitarianism. Given these assumptions, an animal's “moral weight” is that animal's capacity for welfare—the total amount of welfare that the animal could realize. Capacity for welfare = welfare range (the difference between the best and worst welfare states the individual can realize at a time) × lifespan. Given welfare ranges, we can convert welfare improvements into DALY-equivalents averted, making cross-species cost-effectiveness analyses possible. An Introduction to the Moral Weight Project If we want to do as much good as possible, we have to compare all the ways of doing good—including ways that involve helping members of different species. But do benefits to humans count the same as benefits to chickens? What about chickens vs. carp? Carp vs. honey bees? In 2020, Rethink Priorities published the Moral Weight Series—a collection of five reports about these and related questions. The first introduces different theories of welfare and moral status and their interrelationships. The second compares two ways of estimating differences in capacity for welfare and moral status. The third explores the rate of subjective experience, its importance, and potential variation in the rate of subjective experience across taxa. The fourth considers critical flicker-fusion frequency as a proxy for the rate of subjective experience. The fifth assesses whether there's variation in the intensity ranges of valenced experiences from species to species. In May 2021, Rethink Priorities launched the Moral Weight Project, which extended and implemented the research program that those initial reports discussed. This post is the first in the Moral Weight Project Sequence. The aim of the sequence is to provide an overview of the research that Rethink Priorities conducted between May 2021 and October 2022 on interspecific cause prioritization—i.e., making resource allocation decisions across species. The aim of this post is to introduce the project and explain how EAs could use its results. DALYs-averted and “moral weight discounts” If we want to do the most good per dollar spent—that is, if we want to maximize cost-effectiveness—we need a common currency for comparing very different interventions. GiveWell, Founders Pledge, Open Philanthropy, and many other EA organizations currently have one: namely, the number of “disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) averted.” A DALY is a health measure with two parts: years of human life lost and years of human life lost to disability. The former measures the extent to which a condition shortens a human's life; the latter measures the health impact of living with a condition in terms of years of life lost. Together, these values represent the overall burden of the condition. So, averting a DALY is averting a loss—namely, the loss of a single year of human life that's lived at full health. Historically, some EAs used a “moral weight discount” to convert changes in animals' welfare levels directly into DALYs-averted. That is, they understood the basic question to be: At what point should we be indifferent between (say) improving chickens' welfare and preventing the loss of a year of healthy human life? Then, the task is to identify the correct “moral weight discount rate” to apply to the value of some quantity of chicken welfare to make it equal to the value of averting a DALY. This framing makes it tempting to think in terms of the value that (certain groups of) people assign to chicken welfare (or the welfare of the members of whatever species) relative to the ...

Bob Fischer, creator of 'Haunted Generation,' joins us for a wide-ranging chat about Hauntology, and how ‘Haunted Generation' feelings of an uncanny childhood differ around the world. We cover Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World and the how the paranormal was presented in the 70s. We cover memories of a pre-digital age, Alan Garner and the Owl Service, Nicholas Fisk and ‘Grinny' and a few of our favourite 'Paranormal Ambient' albums. There are warm Fighting Fantasy memories, Bob talks about meeting Ian Livingstone, and we reminisce about visiting Fighting Fantasy Fest, and even cover Cian's childhood 'House Of Hell' imitation! Links Buy Me A Coffee Haunted Generation Website Haunted Generation on Twitter Ghost Box Records Electronic Sound Magazine Spurious Transients Night Monitor Grey Frequency Mombi Yuleman – Beneath Bridgewater House of Horror on Felt Trips Correction to Witchcraft Murder episode Science, Popular Culture and Cryptozoology

In this episode, Susan and Sinéad revisit a book which haunted both their childhoods - Catherine Storr's 1958 fantasy classic Marianne Dreams. We get deep inside the symbolism of this brilliant little book, discussing the nature of dreams and fantasy and how stories contain universes. Come with us as we watch Marianne and Mark battle their way past the Watchers... Sit with us on the grass as we ask ourselves what the enigmatic ending of this book is really trying to say... And try not to laugh at Sinéad's visceral terror reactions to the Terrible Awful Very Scary Things in this book (stones! With *eyes*!)Referenced in this podcast:"Musty Books: 'Marianne Dreams' by Catherine Storr (1958); a blog article on The Haunted Generation with Bob Fischer, July 6, 2020"I Write to Frighten Myself": Catherine Storr and the Development of Children's Literature Studies in Britain; Kimberley Reynolds, Children's Literature in Education 50, 449-463, 2019Fear and Evil in Children's Books; Catherine Storr, Children's Literature in Education 1, 22-40, 1970The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, TaschenOur podcast bookshop in Ireland is Halfway Up the Stairs: www.halfwayupthestairs.ieIn the UK, check out our storefront on: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/Storyshaped. Disclaimer: If you buy books linked to our site, we may earn a commission from bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this 69th episode of the Brian Hornback Experience I talk to Bob Fischer, Democrat Candidate for Knox County Mayor 2022. May 3, 2022 Primary Election, Early Voting April 13-28. Most of the links you need for Brian Hornback are here. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/brian-hornback/support

A successful businessman, Robert "Bob" Fischer began his journey with a family legacy in the furniture business. His success continued to flourish with additional stores, and as Bob was nearing retirement, he knew that his work was not done. It would transition to leaving an even greater legacy... for his family and for generations to come in cities around the country. You'll want to hear his story and about his involvement in several transformative initiatives for Christ. Bob Fischer's bio. PinnacleForum.com Show Notes: https://pinnacleforum.com/2022/02/ul-podcast-186/

Broadcaster and writer Bob Fischer discusses day 18 of Peter Jackson's Get Back - Monday 27th January 1969 - with Chris Shaw.

Joining Tom Jackson - recorded remotely thanks to the brilliant Wardour Studios - to discuss the postcards from their pasts are writer and broadcaster BOB FISCHER (Wiffle Lever To Full!, Summer Winos) and writer and media and communications consultant RACHAEL CHADWICK (60 Postcards). Together, we wade in nostalgia for school outward bound centres, explore a unique grief project in Paris, try living without the internet and learn about a family postcard mystery in the East End. Plus, Saturday Night Fever finally reviewed by a pack of girl guides. Wish you were here? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On this episode of Knowing Animals, we speak to Dr Bob Fischer. Bob is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Texas State University and co-director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals. We talk about his book The Ethics of Eating Animals: Usually Bad, Sometimes Wrong, Often Permissible, which was published by Routledge in 2020. This episode of Knowing Animals is brought to you by the Australasian Animal Studies Association (http://animalstudies.org.au/) and the Animal Publics book series (https://sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/collections/series-animal-publics).

Are some animals more equal than others? Do zoos protect animals or are they solely designed for our amusement? Should we test medicines on animals?

Writer and broadcaster Bob Fischer discusses Paul McCartney's 1989 album 'Flowers in the Dirt' with Chris Shaw.

Episode 58 of the 'Round The Archives' podcast sees the Summer Winos discussing their new book about the early days of 'Last Of The Summer Wine'. Warren considers the time that 'Kolchak : The Night Stalker' encountered a werewolf on a cruise ship, then Paul and Nick tune into some local radio with 'Shoestring'. Finally Lisa & Andrew find themselves in the late 1950s where they 'Dial 999'. That's all in Episode 58 of 'Round The Archives' starring Lisa Parker, Andrew Trowbridge, Bob Fischer, Andrew T Smith, Warren Cummings, Nick Goodman and Paul Chandler. You can find more details on 'Last Of The Summer Wine' at summerwinos.co.uk where the book is available to order.

It's Eat Meat Week!  Enjoy as much meat as you desire for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  The America's Veteran's Stories is starting a new series.  The book Echoes of Our War: Vietnam Veterans Reflect 50 Years Later presented by Col. Bob Fischer features veterans that will be on Kim's show starting this Sunday on KLZ, 3-4pm.  HB21-1164 Total Program Mill Levy Tax Credit will result in real estate tax increases without a vote of the people, clearly ignoring TABOR. Lorne Levy, mortgage specialist with Polygon Financial, comments that interest rates have been holding steady.  With the threat of inflation, now is a good time to get pre-qualified in order to know what your buying power is as you search for your home.  Give Lorne a call at 303-880-8881. What's for dinner?  Meat!  Tyler Schmidt, owner of Two Rivers BBQ in South Fork, CO, will have his Meat In event on March 20th throughout the day.  10% of proceeds will go to benefit 4H and FFA (Future Farmers of America) groups in the valley and to support the hard-working farmers and ranchers in the valley.  Willie Altenburg notes that the Centennial Livestock Auction inn Fort Collins will be hosting a  BBQ on March 20th.  The event coincides with their annual bull sale, 120 bulls to be exact.  Come by from 11:30am-4pm for great BBQ. Jason McBride, Senior Vice President with Presidential Wealth Management, states that the Meat Out Day Proclamation by Gov. Polis is not wise as it affects the economy, the producer and the consumer.  Agriculture is the second highest producing industry in the state.  So plan ahead and make sure you are fully stocked with all your meat for Saturday.  Planning is important, especially for your retirement years.  Jason can help you create a plan and search for solutions that will help when uncertain times are present.  You can always participate in the market as there are options to choose from.  Jason can be contacted at 303-694-1600. Guest Brad Beck, co-founder of Liberty Toastmasters, joins Kim to discuss “cultural appropriations” and his most recent op-ed, Catching Leprechauns (https://kimmonson.com/featured_articles/catching-leprechauns/).   It is now mandatory in some circles to celebrate certain holidays from afar.  This is opposed to our unique melting pot acknowledging the culture and heritage of all.  The 1776 Project informs us that we see the roots of this in Marxism.  PBIs (Politicians, Bureaucrats and Interested Parties) intentionally want to divide us into categories as this gives them power, control and money.  Special rights for specific categories negate equal rights.  Western civilization needs to survive the assault against it.  The American Idea is unique in that it protects individual rights and property rights.

At long last, the time has come to (once again) don our tuxedos and roll out the red carpet. Welcome to The Woodies: The Tom Hanks Awards! All podcast long, we've talked about our favorite (and least favorite) parts of Tom Hanks's movies and TV roles, and we announced our official selections for the best and worst of what Tom Hanks's filmography has to offer and opened the voting to the public. Now, your votes have been tallied, our very special guest Bob Fischer has verified the results, and it's finally time to reveal our picks -- as well as the fans' selection -- for each and every category. Live, from the internet, it's The Woodies: The Tom Hanks Awards!

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which writer and occasional broadcaster Tim Worthington talks to a guest about some of the things that they remember that nobody else ever seems to. This is a collection of highlights from shows sixty one to sixty six, featuring Justin Lewis on the original Only Fools And Horses theme tune, Jane Hill on His Land, Gabby Hutchinson Crouch on The Llŷn Peninsula Earthquake, Carrie Dunn on Too Close To The Sun, Tom Williamson on Samurai Pizza Cats and Bob Fischer on Eighties Tabloid Celebrities . Along the way we'll be finding out what evasive manoeuvres to take if Cliff Richard’s guitar starts falling over in church, querying where Matt Goss might actually have watched a very old wall crumble, puzzling over how New York can be ‘The Citiest Of Cities’, recalling Joan Collins’ scandalous affair with Ian Revolution 9-Smith, and holding a Bad Musicals Support Group meeting in the interval of another bad musical. You can find more editions of Looks Unfamiliar at http://timworthington.org/ Plus there's something you may not have heard - Tim on It's An S Pod Thing! talking to Sophie Davies about S Club 7 - Back To The '50s.

When you were a child did you ever have feelings of yearning, melancholy, or a wistful dreaminess to the way you perceived the world around you? If you did, you'll be pleased to know that a movement called Hauntology explores these feelings in great detail! Hauntology originated as a philosophical concept introduced by Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx. Put simply, it refers to the persistence of our past presenting itself in the future, in the manner of a ghost. However, in recent years it has expanded far beyond that and the term explores feelings of nostalgia, childhood disquiet and lost futures through music, art and writing – with a heavy focus on a 1970's childhood.  In today's episode I have a chat to Bob Fischer - author of the book Wiffle Lever To Full! writer for The Fortean Times, Electric Sound Magazine and creator of the blog The Haunted Generation. Here is an overview of some of things me and Bob chat about: • What hauntology Is and where the idea originated. • The effect old film and photographs have on you as a child. • A child's perception of time and its hauntological effect. • Do 70's children have a different perception of nostalgia compared to children of today? • When Bob realised his childhood feelings related to hauntology.  • Some 90's/ 00's kids show that gave me hauntological feelings. • The influence Alan Garner had on Bob growing up. • The changing ideas of ‘lost futures' from the 60's up to the present day. • Different era's bleeding into each other creating a multi layered hauntological effect. • Hypothesising hauntological feelings of the future. Episode Extras: https://www.patreon.com/posts/40537106   (Recorded August 2020)

This time around, Bob Fischer stays indoors  in Yarm, North Yorkshire, where he listens to the 2017 Radio 3 documentary, Between the Ears: Second Side Up (https://bit.ly/TVCIndoors010). Then he tells TV Cream all about it.

A special collection of highlights from Looks Unfamiliar requested by you, the listener - featuring Bob Fischer on Giant Hogweed, Samira Ahmed on Havoc, Jenny Morrill on Boots Global Collection, Mitch Benn on Two Stage Self-Assembly Ice Cream Cones, Mark Thompson on A. Mazing Monsters, Vikki Gregorich And Jeff Lewis on The Last American, Justin Lewis on Orbit, Emma Burnell on Split Second, Gillian Kirby on Teletext After Hours, Phil Norman on The Country Life Christmas Box, Andy Lewis on Vintage Anti-Enoch Powell Graffiti, and Rae Earl on Cheese And Onion. You can find the full shows and many more editions of Looks Unfamiliar at http://timworthington.org/

In this Month’s Podcast we revisit an Interview with the Current Public Relations Manager, DTM Bob Fischer where he lays out the some thoughts for the Toastmaster year. Are you leveraging all the media that you can? Reach out to … Continue reading →

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which writer and occasional broadcaster Tim Worthington talks to a guest about some of the things that they remember that nobody else ever seems to. This is a collection of highlights from shows thirty one to thirty six, featuring Bob Fischer on Giant Hogweed, Gillian Kirby on Teletext After Hours, Tim Worthington on Patterson, Michael Livesley on Topps Football '78 Bubblegum Cards, Chris Shaw on Rock School, and Andy Lewis on Vintage Anti-Enoch Powell Graffiti. Along the way we’ll be blowing the whistle on The Brexit Party’s sinister links to Giant Hogweed, finding out about the contribution Emlyn Hughes’ elongated leg made to road safety, planning a visit to The People’s Republic Of KDR, listening to Herbie Hancock jamming with Emu, finding out how to get the full immersive Laurel And Hardy experience by eating toffee, and definitely not drinking any ‘Solar Cola’. Plus there's also something you might not have heard before – Tim on Round The Archives talking to Lisa Parker and Andrew Trowbridge about the last ever episode of Chigley… You can find the full versions of these episodes of Looks Unfamiliar - and many more besides - at http://timworthington.org/

Looks Unfamiliar is a podcast in which writer and occasional broadcaster Tim Worthington talks to a guest about some of the things that they remember that nobody else ever seems to. Joining Tim this time is broadcaster Bob Fischer, who's saying 'aaaaahld up to anyone who doesn't remember BBC Daytime variety show The Tom O'Connor Roadshow, a media panic about hazardous plant Giant Hogweed, EastEnders spinoff single Can't Get A Ticket (For The World Cup) by Peter Dean, rum-favoured confectionery Glee Bars, J. Edward Oliver's 'Abolish Tuesday' campaign, and How To Be A Wally by Paul Manning. Along the way we'll be finding out the difference between 'spectators' and 'fans', blowing the whistle on The Brexit Party's sinister links to Giant Hogweed, working out how to get from Peter Dean to David Bowie in three moves, and learning far too much about the industrial action practices of school dinner ladies. You can find more editions of Looks Unfamiliar at http://timworthington.org/

This week on Knowing Animals I am joined by Nekeisha Alayna Alexis. Nekeisha is an independent scholar. We discuss her upcoming book chapter ‘Beyond Compare: Intersectionality and Interspecieism for Co-Liberation with Other Animals’ which will appear in the Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics. That Handbook will be available in 2019 and is edited by Bob Fischer. This episode of Knowing Animals is brought to you by AASA. AASA is the Australasian Animal Studies Association. You can find AASA on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/AASA-Australasian-Animal-Studies-Association-480316142116752/. Join AASA today!  

Episode 33 sees us take a trip to Chigley, where Tim Worthington joins us to discuss how Mister Antonio got involved with arranging 'A Present For Lord Belborough'. Martin Holmes takes a look at a 1977 publication about 'Doctor Who' Companions, then Bob Fischer and Andrew T Smith conclude their chat about 'Last Of The Summer Wine'. Nick Goodman considers the forthcoming Dalek books by Eric Saward along with the animation of 'The Macra Terror' then Simon Exton & Ken Moss of 'The ExtonMoss Experiment' podcast review the pilot episode of 'MacGyver'.

Bob Fischer talks about the legacy of Joshua and how he led his family through dependence on God.

Episode 32 sees Martin take a look at the first episode of 'Poirot' starring David Suchet. We welcome on board Bob Fischer and Andrew T Smith to talk about their love for 'Last Of The Summer Wine'. Paul and Nick examine the series 'Maggie And Her', then Warren joins us to review the last two episodes of 'It Ain't Half Hot Mum'. And after over 30 episodes, we finally admit the debt we owe to 'Round The Horne'...

Join Bob Fischer as he shares his perfect night in...

In this episode I am lucky to be joined by J. Baird Callicott. Baird is University Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas. We discuss Baird’s book chapter “The Environmental Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which appeared in a book edited by Ben Bramble and Bob Fischer, titled The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat and published by Oxford University Press in 2015.   This episode of Knowing Animals is brought to you by AASA. AASA is the Australasian Animal Studies Association. You can find AASA on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/AASA-Australasian-Animal-Studies-Association-480316142116752/. Join AASA today!   This episode of Knowing Animals is brought to you the podcast 'Species'. Learn about a different species of animal each week with this interesting half hour podcast. Find out more here: http://species.libsyn.com.     

For this episode, we interview Dr. Felipe Leon on the metaphysical possibility of creation ex nihilo - or creation ‘out of nothing’. This is an indispensable metaphysical doctrine to classical theists. Dr. Felipe Leon is professor of philosophy at El Camino College in Torrance, CA. He received his M.A and Ph.D at University of California Riverside, and his current research interests are in philosophy of religion and modal epistemology. Recently, Dr. Leon co-edited and contributed to a collection along with Bob Fischer entitled Modal Epistemology After Rationalism. Among other things, the collection indicates the recent trend in modal epistemology to seek the ground of our modal knowledge in empirical sources, such as observation and observation-sensitive theory. Felipe also runs the ex-apologist philosophy of religion blog which has a wealth of fantastic content that listeners to this podcast will no doubt enjoy.

In today's world, there are many religions. Why choose Christianity? What is the difference between the God of our faith vs. the gods of other religions. In this message, Dr. Bob Fischer teaches us about the love of God and how He paid the ultimate price to have a real and loving relationship with us. Listen in to this incredible example.

Wow, so much to get through in this week's podKast, from Peter Capaldi's first #DoctorWho photoshoot to missing episodes - stopping off at the fascinating topic of "was John Hurt cast to replace Christopher Eccleston or not?" on the way. The podKast team of Christian Cawley, Brian Terranova and James McLean have an interesting hour of discussion for you, and just because we love you, dear listener, we've left in a segment in which Christian and James BOTH dry up, with hilarious consequences! We also have a nice collection of recommendations for you, from Wiffle Lever to Full by Bob Fischer to The Beginning from Big Finish.

exapme from the blog click links to read more from Neil. AUDIO from the bbc local radio - suplied from the internet/other podcasts and provided here simply incase you missed it. With the Wife with the Wife in Space Nuffink in ze world can stop us now! Except this story, obviously... A couple of hours before we settled down to watch The Underwater Menace, Sue and I appeared as guests on Bob Fischer's BBC Tees radio show to shamelessly plug this blog. You can listen to the edited highlights below (and Sue's PVC Dalek-suit anecdote was news to me!): Episode One Sue: That's just great. This story is going to star that ****ing hat. I hate that ****ing hat. We both enjoy the opening TARDIS scene, especially Jamie's reactions to the insanity he has walked into. There's a playful edge to the proceedings and a warmth we haven't really felt since the glory days of Ian, Susan and Barbara. We chuckle when Ben sarcastically hopes for the Daleks ("I bet the kids wouldn't have complained") while the Doctor's desire to encounter prehistoric monsters is dismissed out of hand ("not on this budget, love"). Me: Where do you hope they'll end up this time? Sue: Somewhere with decent carpentry. The TARDIS arrives on a beach and when Polly guesses at their whereabouts, Sue declares, in perfect harmony: Sue: Cornwall! It's always ****ing Cornwall! It doesn't take very long for our heroes to find themselves in danger: a platform they have been standing on is actually a lift, and as they hurtle beneath the sea, the TARDIS crew succumb to the bends. Sue: That's very interesting. Ben just asked Polly to get them out of there. He didn't ask the Doctor and he's standing right next to him. I don't blame Ben though; this Doctor is still pretty useless. When they regain consciousness, Polly finds some pottery with the logo for the 1968 Mexico Olympiad emblazoned on it, and then our heroes are confronted by a race of people dressed in clam shells and seaweed. Sue believes she has it sussed: Sue: Are they rehearsing for the Opening Ceremony? Their high priest even sports a fish on his head: Sue: Please tell me the Doctor doesn't get a hat like that. Just as Sue believes she has a handle on events, our heroes are strapped to some slabs and sadistically lowered toward a mad man's pet sharks. Sue: Is this a Bond movie now? Me: Yes. You Only Live 13 Times. Sue: Has this got anything to do with the Olympics? Anything at all? When the Doctor signs his name 'Dr. W', he reignites an old debate: Sue: You can't really argue with that, can you? That settles it: his name is Dr. Who. You'll just have to accept it, love. Me: Unless his real name begins with a W - Sue: Like Doctor Wibbly-Wobbly-Timey-Wimey? Would that make you feel any better? And does it really matter? I call him Dr. Who all the time - Me: Yes, I know. And every time you do it, part of me dies. When Professor Zaroff reveals that they are currently hanging out on the lost continent of Atlantis, Sue doesn't even flinch: Sue: Atlantis. Of course it's Atlantis. Where else would they be in this ****-ed up programme? So, it's James Bond on Atlantis? Gotcha. Thanks to those fainthearted Australians, the cliffhanger moves, although we find ourselves sympathising with the censor as Polly is strapped to a table and threatened with a large hypodermic needle by some evil scientists who want to turn her into a fish. Yes, a fish. Sue: I don't know what Polly is moaning about; I'd love to breathe underwater indefinitely. She could stick around and enter the 1972 Olympics. Mark Spitz would have nothing on her. Episode Two Me: How short is Polly's surgical gown - Sue: Trust you to notice that, love. The hot topic of conversation during this episode is Zaroff. Who else? Sue: He reminds me of that mad scientist from that show you love: Comedy Theater 2000 - Me: Mystery Science Theater 3000 - Sue: That's it. He reminds me of the mad scientist from that: an over-the-top pantomime villain. Me: Believe it or not, the guy playing him is actually a very fine actor - Sue: Oh, I don't doubt it. He's just having a laugh with the part. And who can blame him? How else would you play this character? His plan is completely pointless; there's no clever reason for him to do any of this, he just wants to blow up the world. There's no benefit or motive at all. Me: He's insane. Sue: It's lazy. With no motivation or backstory you have to play him as a larger-than-life lunatic. I like him; he's committed. He's definitely the funniest villain we've had in the series so far. When Ben and Jamie are taken to the mines of Atlantis, a high pitched whining cuts through the scene. We assume it represents the sound of the drilling but whatever it is, it's making our teeth itch. Sue: If we were 16 years old, we would hear that sound whenever we went near an off-license - Me: Have you warmed to Troughton yet? He's basically playing his version of the Doctor now. More or less. Sue: He reminds me of Ken Dodd in some of these stills. That one in particular (see right). The music doesn't help. It's atrocious. It sounds like they've let a small child loose on a Bontempi organ. This is the worst music that I've heard in the series so far. Who's responsible for it? Me: An Australian called Dudley Simpson - Sue: Sack him. He's rubbish. Episode Three Finally, after enduring thirteen consecutive recons (count them! thirteen!), we are reunited with a real bona fide episode. I never thought I'd ever hear myself say this but thank Amdo for The Underwater Menace Episode 3. Sue: Even though the story is still a complete mess, it's a thousand times easier to follow it when it exists. I don't want to state the bleedin' obvious but even the very worst story improves when you can actually see it. The recons I gave good scores to must have been incredible - The highlight of the episode for Sue is, of course, the sight of Jamie and Ben in tight-fitting rubber: Sue: Given the state of some of their costumes, they should have called this story The Underwear Menace. Me: I think the playwright Joe Orton mentioned this story in his diary. Or was it in Salmon Rushdie's The Satanic Verses? No, it must have been Joe Orton; he fancied Jamie in his rubber suit, I think. Or maybe it was Kenneth Williams. My memory is almost as bad as yours. Sue: Jamie and Ben wouldn't look out of place at that nightclub, Heaven. As if to accentuate this observation, Jamie and Ben suddenly launch themselves into the campest salute this side of 'Allo 'Allo. Sue: I'll say no more. Sue: Does Troughton ever go through a story where he doesn't play that bloody recorder? And are there any stories where he doesn't dress up at the drop of a hat (which he'll probably pick up and put on)? He's a borderline transvestite. Me: You might want to hold onto something during the next scene. We're about to meet the Fish People. Sue: They look like a second-rate dance troupe who are waiting to audition for Britain's Got Talent. They're probably going to do a up-tempo version of Yellow Submarine. A miner called Jacko attempts to turn the Fish People into striking militants. He does this by winding them up a bit. At one point he cries, "Are you not men?" and, quick as a flash, Sue replies: Sue: No! We're fish! What are you, blind? Hang on, is that Polly in a snorkel? Me: No, it's a Fish Person. Sue: They're having a laugh. And then it happens. Impossible to describe. Impossible to watch. Sue: This is the lowest point in Doctor Who yet. By some considerable margin. Please make it stop. Me: Is this worse than ? Sue: Oh yes, this is even more half-arsed. Me: It's like a perverse joke: you wait 13 episodes for a real episode and then you get this. Sue: I take it all back - this would have been much better as a recon. Something that really niggles at us is the Fish People's economic impact on Atlantis, which is based on the assumption that the food they farm must be consumed immediately: Sue: OK, let me get this straight: Zaroff has a nuclear reactor but he hasn't got a fridge - or, better still, a fridge freezer - to put any food in? That makes no sense at all. Me: This is your first proper look at Patrick Troughton. Have you formed an opinion yet? Sue: I feel a little more comfortable with him now that I've seen him in action. He's far more animated than I expected and he's definitely got charisma. There's something about him. Sadly, the director isn't doing him any favours so I'll have to reserve judgement until I've seen some more. And then we reach the moment The Underwater Menace is probably best known for. But immediately before it arrives - and I'd completely forgotten this - Zaroff stabs someone with a spear, he shoots someone at point-blank range and then he has two others killed off-screen. It's horrific! But it's completely eclipsed by what follows: Sue: Wow. It's so mesmerising, we have to watch it again. And again. And again. Sue: He's having a whale of a time. Me: I'm glad someone is. Episode Four Sue: I still can't believe he didn't bring some fridges with him. Still, I guess if you are planning to blow up the world you can't think of everything. You know, I think every episode of Doctor Who could be improved with a Zaroff. The only thing missing is a scene of him tearing his hair out as he screams, "Why am I surrounded by idiots!". Me: There's still twenty minutes to go. I wouldn't rule anything out. Sue: I like the way the show has kept to its educational remit. Me: What? Sue: Jamie is from the past and therefore he doesn't understand what radioactivity is. Some of the children watching this wouldn't know either - Me: Yeah, that's great. There's just one tiny problem: they don't explain it. Polly says she can't be bothered! Polly and Jamie are struggling to escape the rising waters of Atlantis: Sue: It's turned into a disaster movie now. Me: Oh, it's a disaster all right. Sue: Why is Polly wearing a fireplace corbel on her head? Me: I don't even know what that means. Thanks to those Aussie wimps, we get to see Professor Zaroff drown. Well, I say drown... Sue: That's not drowning! Zaroff has hours left before the water rises above his head! Maybe he was bored and he decided to commit suicide? The world saved, the Doctor and his companions leave the Atlantans to it. Sue: Why are they bothering to rebuild Atlantis anyway? Why don't they just move up to the surface? They've got fridges up there. And while they missed the 1968 Olympics, Mexico have got the World Cup in 1970. It would be a shame if they missed it. The Final Score Sue: That was bonkers. And a little bit shit. 2/10 Sue: Zaroff was excellent, though. I could watch him all day. I'm not convinced that he's dead either; I think he was just wetting his hair a bit. He should definitely return in the new series. The League of Gentlemen could play him. Me: What, all of them? The experiment continues. Tags: , , , , Click to share this