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Comment by sodality2 | Hacker News Reader

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sodality2·

> “Shouldn’t you give neuron counts more weight in your estimates?”

Rethink Priorities [0] has a FAQ entry on this [1].

[0]: https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/welfare-range-es...

[1]: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Mfq7KxQRvkeLnJvoB/...

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Which I referenced and called arbitrary.

Your claim that it's arbitrary doesn't really have much weight without further reasoning.

The problem is that the reasoning they give is so vague that there isn’t really anything to argue against. At best, they convincingly argue, in an extremely non-information-dense way, that neuron count isn’t everything, which is obviously true. They do not manage to argue convincingly that a 100k neuron system is something that we can even apply the word “suffering” to meaningfully.

But if neuron counts, as they show, have no reliable correlation (and in some cases an inverse correlation) with valenced experience, why would we use them to rule out intense experiences?

This feels like a severe motte and bailey. The motte is “neuron count is not perfectly linearly correlated with sentience” and the bailey is “neuron count has no reliable correlation with sentience”.

The priors referenced in the “technical details” doc (and good lord, why does everything about this require me to dereference three or four layers of pointers to get to basic answers to methodological questions?) appear to be based entirely on proxies like:

> Responses such as moving away, escaping, and avoidance, that seem to account for noxious stimuli intensity and direction.

This is a proxy that applies to slime molds and Roombas, yet I notice that neither of those made the table. Why not?

I suspect that the answer is that at least when it comes to having zero neurons, the correlation suddenly becomes pretty obviously reliable after all.

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