Do you have any plans for projects decreasing the uncertainty of interspecies comparisons of expectedhedonistic welfare? If not, would you be enthusiastic about doing work on this given enough funding restricted to it? I wonder what you would do with 1 k, 10 k, 100 k, 1 M, and 10 M$.
I think much more work on interspecies welfare comparisons is needed to conclude which interventions robustly increase welfare. I do not know about any intervention which robustly increases welfare due to potentially dominant uncertain effects on soil animals and microorganisms. Even neglecting these, I believe there is lots of room to change funding decisions as a result of more research on interspecies comparisons of expected hedonistic welfare. I understand Ambitious Impact (AIM), Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE), maybe the Animal Welfare Fund (AWF), and Coefficient Giving (CG) sometimes for robustness checks use the (expected) welfare ranges you initially presented, or the ones in Bob’s book as if they are within a factor of 10 of the right estimates (such that these could 10 % to 10 times as large). However, I can easily see much larger differences. For example, the estimate in Bob’s book for the (expected) welfare range of shrimps is 8.0 % that of humans, but I would say one (not the only) reasonable best guess is 10^-6, the ratio between the number of neurons of shrimps and humans.
Thanks for your question and for your patience waiting for our response—we’ve just come back from our end-of-year break.
We don’t currently have anything scheduled on this topic, but we regularly review project ideas and may consider working on something like this a little later in the year. Dedicated funding would certainly make it more likely that we could prioritize this work. If we do decide to explore this further, we’d first need to scope out what a project in this area might look like, but would be happy to discuss different funding levels and what they could enable at that point.
Approximately $2K would be sufficient to scope out a project like this, provided we have capacity at the time. We’re usually able to accommodate some scoping work alongside ongoing projects though.
I would be happy to donate 2 k$ to RP myself. You could use this to scope out whatever project or projects you believe would decrease the most cost-effectively the uncertainty about how the (expectedhedonistic) welfare per unit time of different organisms and digital systems compares with that of humans.
Do you have any plans for projects decreasing the uncertainty of interspecies comparisons of expected hedonistic welfare? If not, would you be enthusiastic about doing work on this given enough funding restricted to it? I wonder what you would do with 1 k, 10 k, 100 k, 1 M, and 10 M$.
I think much more work on interspecies welfare comparisons is needed to conclude which interventions robustly increase welfare. I do not know about any intervention which robustly increases welfare due to potentially dominant uncertain effects on soil animals and microorganisms. Even neglecting these, I believe there is lots of room to change funding decisions as a result of more research on interspecies comparisons of expected hedonistic welfare. I understand Ambitious Impact (AIM), Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE), maybe the Animal Welfare Fund (AWF), and Coefficient Giving (CG) sometimes for robustness checks use the (expected) welfare ranges you initially presented, or the ones in Bob’s book as if they are within a factor of 10 of the right estimates (such that these could 10 % to 10 times as large). However, I can easily see much larger differences. For example, the estimate in Bob’s book for the (expected) welfare range of shrimps is 8.0 % that of humans, but I would say one (not the only) reasonable best guess is 10^-6, the ratio between the number of neurons of shrimps and humans.
Hi Vasco,
Thanks for your question and for your patience waiting for our response—we’ve just come back from our end-of-year break.
We don’t currently have anything scheduled on this topic, but we regularly review project ideas and may consider working on something like this a little later in the year. Dedicated funding would certainly make it more likely that we could prioritize this work. If we do decide to explore this further, we’d first need to scope out what a project in this area might look like, but would be happy to discuss different funding levels and what they could enable at that point.
Thanks!
Thanks for clarifying, Hannah! How much dedicated funding would you have to receive to scope out projects (without commiting to doing a project)?
Approximately $2K would be sufficient to scope out a project like this, provided we have capacity at the time. We’re usually able to accommodate some scoping work alongside ongoing projects though.
I would be happy to donate 2 k$ to RP myself. You could use this to scope out whatever project or projects you believe would decrease the most cost-effectively the uncertainty about how the (expected hedonistic) welfare per unit time of different organisms and digital systems compares with that of humans.
Thanks so much for your offer to support this, Vasco. I’ll follow up with you about this on email.