For context, this post is motivated by the realization that pain-scales are logarithmic compressions of what is probably an exponentially-increasing capacity for pain and suffering in sentient beings. Here is a simple example, as told by the guy who stung himself with 80+ insects to put the pain on a scale:
4:28 - The harvester ants is what got the sting pain scale going in the first place. I had been stung by honey bees, old jackers, paper wasps, etc. the garden variety stuff, that you get bitten by various beetles and things. I went down to Georgia, which has the Eastern-most extension of the harvester. I got stung and I said “Wooooow! This is DIFFERENT!” You know? I thought I knew everything there was about sting insects, I was just this dumb little kid. And realized “Wait a minute! There is something different going on here”, and that’s what got me to do the comparative analysis. Is this unique to harvester ants? Or are there others that are like that. It turns out while the answer is now we know what’s later—it’s unique! [unique type of pain].
7:09 - I didn’t really wanted to go out and get stung for fun. I was this desperate graduate student trying to get a thesis, so I could get out and get a real job, and stop being a student eventually. And I realized that, oh, we can measure toxicity, you know, the killing power of something, but we can’t measure pain… ouch, that one hurst, and that one hurts, and ouch that one over there also hurts… but I can’t put that on a computer program and mathematically analyze what it means for the pain of the insect. So I said, aha! We need a pains scale. A computer can analyze one, two, three, and four, but it can’t analyze “ouch!”. So I decided that I had to make a pain scale, with the harvester ant (cutting to the chase) was a 3. Honey bees was a 2. And I kind of tell people that each number is like 10 equivalent of the number before. So 10 honey bee stings are equal to 1 harvester ant sting, and 10 harvester ant stings would equal one bullet ant sting.
Some EAs have already pointed this out, but I suspect that this has yet to make it into “EA Canon” and it thus hasn’t really given rise to novel interventions. Brian Tomasik, Jonathan Leighton, Manu Herran, David Pearce, and other “suffering focused ethics” people have been saying this for a while. Read more here.
I realize that it is always kind of depressing to look into how bad suffering gets, but it does seem important to know if one is indeed trying to reduce suffering as much as possible.
I’ve suggested something similar for happiness (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7Kv5cik4JWoayHYPD/nonlinear-perception-of-happiness ). If you don’t want to introduce the weird asymmetry where negative counts and positive not, what you get out of that could be somewhat surprising—it possibly recovers more “common folk” altruism where helping people who are already quite well off could be good, and if you allow more speculative views on the space on mind-states, you are at risk of recovering something closely resembling some sort of “buddhist utilitarian calculus”.
For context, this post is motivated by the realization that pain-scales are logarithmic compressions of what is probably an exponentially-increasing capacity for pain and suffering in sentient beings. Here is a simple example, as told by the guy who stung himself with 80+ insects to put the pain on a scale:
4:28 - The harvester ants is what got the sting pain scale going in the first place. I had been stung by honey bees, old jackers, paper wasps, etc. the garden variety stuff, that you get bitten by various beetles and things. I went down to Georgia, which has the Eastern-most extension of the harvester. I got stung and I said “Wooooow! This is DIFFERENT!” You know? I thought I knew everything there was about sting insects, I was just this dumb little kid. And realized “Wait a minute! There is something different going on here”, and that’s what got me to do the comparative analysis. Is this unique to harvester ants? Or are there others that are like that. It turns out while the answer is now we know what’s later—it’s unique! [unique type of pain].
7:09 - I didn’t really wanted to go out and get stung for fun. I was this desperate graduate student trying to get a thesis, so I could get out and get a real job, and stop being a student eventually. And I realized that, oh, we can measure toxicity, you know, the killing power of something, but we can’t measure pain… ouch, that one hurst, and that one hurts, and ouch that one over there also hurts… but I can’t put that on a computer program and mathematically analyze what it means for the pain of the insect. So I said, aha! We need a pains scale. A computer can analyze one, two, three, and four, but it can’t analyze “ouch!”. So I decided that I had to make a pain scale, with the harvester ant (cutting to the chase) was a 3. Honey bees was a 2. And I kind of tell people that each number is like 10 equivalent of the number before. So 10 honey bee stings are equal to 1 harvester ant sting, and 10 harvester ant stings would equal one bullet ant sting.
Some EAs have already pointed this out, but I suspect that this has yet to make it into “EA Canon” and it thus hasn’t really given rise to novel interventions. Brian Tomasik, Jonathan Leighton, Manu Herran, David Pearce, and other “suffering focused ethics” people have been saying this for a while. Read more here.
I realize that it is always kind of depressing to look into how bad suffering gets, but it does seem important to know if one is indeed trying to reduce suffering as much as possible.
I’ve suggested something similar for happiness (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7Kv5cik4JWoayHYPD/nonlinear-perception-of-happiness ). If you don’t want to introduce the weird asymmetry where negative counts and positive not, what you get out of that could be somewhat surprising—it possibly recovers more “common folk” altruism where helping people who are already quite well off could be good, and if you allow more speculative views on the space on mind-states, you are at risk of recovering something closely resembling some sort of “buddhist utilitarian calculus”.