Executive summary: Comparing welfare impacts of intense yet brief suffering versus longer yet milder distress poses complex challenges. Currently lacking sufficient evidence on perceived intensities, a pragmatic approach quantifies time separately for varying severities.
Key points:
Evidence suggests more intense pains feel disproportionately worse, but precise relationships remain unclear.
Translating intensities into a single scale carries high uncertainty and can lose situational details.
A granulated metric can currently rank most welfare issues; difficult trade-offs need case-by-case evaluation.
Assessing all consequences, not just immediate experience, is key for informed comparisons.
Extreme ratios in perceived severity would be needed to justify addressing brief intense suffering over chronic moderate distress.
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Executive summary: Comparing welfare impacts of intense yet brief suffering versus longer yet milder distress poses complex challenges. Currently lacking sufficient evidence on perceived intensities, a pragmatic approach quantifies time separately for varying severities.
Key points:
Evidence suggests more intense pains feel disproportionately worse, but precise relationships remain unclear.
Translating intensities into a single scale carries high uncertainty and can lose situational details.
A granulated metric can currently rank most welfare issues; difficult trade-offs need case-by-case evaluation.
Assessing all consequences, not just immediate experience, is key for informed comparisons.
Extreme ratios in perceived severity would be needed to justify addressing brief intense suffering over chronic moderate distress.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.