I see why you made your decisions, but I still think that it would be very useful if people could cite you to say stuff like “According to Welfare Footprint Project, broiler reforms decrease chicken suffering by very roughly 40%-60%”. It’s not for researchers at places like OpenPhil to decide what should be the next welfare ask. It’s for donors, volunteers, researchers who want to mention your conclusions in passing, and even retailers considering whether to sign the Better Chicken Commitment. I don’t know if animal charities would do it, but such a sentence could even be included in petitions urging retailers and restaurants to implement welfare reforms. Yes, it would be more accurate to write that according to your research, “broiler reforms increase annoying pain by 4.5% but decrease hurtful pain by….” But that is clunky and then the reader might be confused about whether the welfare reform are even good because there is more annoying pain. So it’s more difficult to make a point that these reforms are very impactful using your research. Hence, your great work is cited less and has less impact than it could have. And yes, you can’t accurately say whether the reform decreases suffering by 30% or 60% because it might depend on what weights for different categories of pain you will use. But I think that many people assume that it’s more like 5% so whatever you write on the subject, I think it would be useful.
Also, if you don’t do it well, someone else will do it poorly. I wrote sentences based on your research like “broiler reforms avert 50% of suffering” in this comment but I had to use my own weights for categories of pain. But your weights would be much better than mine because clearly you thought about it more. I think I later saw my weights being used in some serious cost-effectiveness estimate, but I don’t remember where.
Also, I want to say that I really appreciate and respect your work, thank you for doing it :)
Thanks for your nice words about our work :) . Yes, I see it can be frustrating to have estimates disaggregated (it is very much for us too), and that it can reduce the use and impact of the work. At this moment though we feel it is important to have a solid evidence-based model to quantify animal suffering. That is, a model that is very robust to scrutiny by academics (so they are more likely to adopt it) and by the industry, one in which all estimates can be justified thoroughly.Traction in the academic community is important because as a small team, we would be unable to analyse all situations of animal suffering (in farming context, research, etc) by ourselves, so ideally academics should adopt it too to enable increasing the coverage of the analyses substantially. Robustness against criticisms by the industry is also important to ensure the credibility of this new type of evidence, as used by advocates, in this early stage. So while we can justify well time in four intensities of suffering, knowledge is not yet available for us to do the same regarding equivalence weights. That said, we have been using summaries of the estimates like “there is a decrease of about 60% of the time in pain for every hen raised in an aviary instead of a cage”. Will try to add summaries like this in the forthcoming work, thanks!
I see. In that case, it might be good for someone else to do the project of determining what weights for your pain categories would be most reasonable, and perhaps you could review that. I’m now considering doing it but it’s unlikely that I will.
Sure, we would be glad to review a project like this. Coincidentally, today I came across an EA post where four people from RP articulated their reasons for choosing to present, or not to present, sentience weights for invertebrates. Our rationale for not providing intensity equivalence weights are very much aligned with the views of Jason K, particularly the notion that any weights we use would be overemphasized and reduce our credibility with potential collaborators. That said, we are not advocating for giving up on this area, it is just that we think we are not there yet.
I see why you made your decisions, but I still think that it would be very useful if people could cite you to say stuff like “According to Welfare Footprint Project, broiler reforms decrease chicken suffering by very roughly 40%-60%”. It’s not for researchers at places like OpenPhil to decide what should be the next welfare ask. It’s for donors, volunteers, researchers who want to mention your conclusions in passing, and even retailers considering whether to sign the Better Chicken Commitment. I don’t know if animal charities would do it, but such a sentence could even be included in petitions urging retailers and restaurants to implement welfare reforms. Yes, it would be more accurate to write that according to your research, “broiler reforms increase annoying pain by 4.5% but decrease hurtful pain by….” But that is clunky and then the reader might be confused about whether the welfare reform are even good because there is more annoying pain. So it’s more difficult to make a point that these reforms are very impactful using your research. Hence, your great work is cited less and has less impact than it could have. And yes, you can’t accurately say whether the reform decreases suffering by 30% or 60% because it might depend on what weights for different categories of pain you will use. But I think that many people assume that it’s more like 5% so whatever you write on the subject, I think it would be useful.
Also, if you don’t do it well, someone else will do it poorly. I wrote sentences based on your research like “broiler reforms avert 50% of suffering” in this comment but I had to use my own weights for categories of pain. But your weights would be much better than mine because clearly you thought about it more. I think I later saw my weights being used in some serious cost-effectiveness estimate, but I don’t remember where.
Also, I want to say that I really appreciate and respect your work, thank you for doing it :)
Thanks for your nice words about our work :) . Yes, I see it can be frustrating to have estimates disaggregated (it is very much for us too), and that it can reduce the use and impact of the work. At this moment though we feel it is important to have a solid evidence-based model to quantify animal suffering. That is, a model that is very robust to scrutiny by academics (so they are more likely to adopt it) and by the industry, one in which all estimates can be justified thoroughly.Traction in the academic community is important because as a small team, we would be unable to analyse all situations of animal suffering (in farming context, research, etc) by ourselves, so ideally academics should adopt it too to enable increasing the coverage of the analyses substantially. Robustness against criticisms by the industry is also important to ensure the credibility of this new type of evidence, as used by advocates, in this early stage. So while we can justify well time in four intensities of suffering, knowledge is not yet available for us to do the same regarding equivalence weights. That said, we have been using summaries of the estimates like “there is a decrease of about 60% of the time in pain for every hen raised in an aviary instead of a cage”. Will try to add summaries like this in the forthcoming work, thanks!
I see. In that case, it might be good for someone else to do the project of determining what weights for your pain categories would be most reasonable, and perhaps you could review that. I’m now considering doing it but it’s unlikely that I will.
Sure, we would be glad to review a project like this. Coincidentally, today I came across an EA post where four people from RP articulated their reasons for choosing to present, or not to present, sentience weights for invertebrates. Our rationale for not providing intensity equivalence weights are very much aligned with the views of Jason K, particularly the notion that any weights we use would be overemphasized and reduce our credibility with potential collaborators. That said, we are not advocating for giving up on this area, it is just that we think we are not there yet.