“Well, the simplest toy example is just going to be, imagine that you have some assessment that says, I think chickens are in a really bad state in factory farms, and I think that if we move layer hens from battery cages into a cage-free environment, we make them 40% better off. And I think that after doing this whole project — whatever the details, we’re just going to make up the toy numbers — I think that chickens have one-tenth of the welfare range of humans.
So now we’ve got 40% change in the welfare for these chickens and we’ve got 10% of the welfare range, so we can multiply these through and say how much welfare you’d be getting in a human equivalent for that benefit to one individual. Then you multiply the number of individuals and you can figure out how much benefit in human units we would be getting.”
It doesn’t seem to me that this follows. Let’s assume the “typical” welfare range for chickens is −10 to 10. Let’s also assume that for humans it’s −100 to 100. This is how I interpret “chickens have 10% of the welfare range of the humans”. Let’s also assume moving from cage to cage-free eliminates 50% of the suffering. We still don’t know whether that’s a move from −10 to −5 or −6 to −3. We also don’t know how to place QALYs within this welfare range. When we save a human, should we assume their welfare to be 100 throughout their life?
This also makes it even more crucial to provide a tight technical definition for welfare range so that scientists can place certain experiences within that range.
I suspect he meant something like an improvement of 40 percentage points along the normalized 0-100% scale, so with a scale of −10 to 10, this would be adding 8 to their welfare: 8=40%*(10-(-10)).
(Or it could just be 40 percentage points along the normalized negative part of the welfare scale, so +4 on a scale of −10 to 10.)
This was super informative for me, thank you.
I’m confused by this section in this interview:
“Well, the simplest toy example is just going to be, imagine that you have some assessment that says, I think chickens are in a really bad state in factory farms, and I think that if we move layer hens from battery cages into a cage-free environment, we make them 40% better off. And I think that after doing this whole project — whatever the details, we’re just going to make up the toy numbers — I think that chickens have one-tenth of the welfare range of humans.
So now we’ve got 40% change in the welfare for these chickens and we’ve got 10% of the welfare range, so we can multiply these through and say how much welfare you’d be getting in a human equivalent for that benefit to one individual. Then you multiply the number of individuals and you can figure out how much benefit in human units we would be getting.”
It doesn’t seem to me that this follows. Let’s assume the “typical” welfare range for chickens is −10 to 10. Let’s also assume that for humans it’s −100 to 100. This is how I interpret “chickens have 10% of the welfare range of the humans”. Let’s also assume moving from cage to cage-free eliminates 50% of the suffering. We still don’t know whether that’s a move from −10 to −5 or −6 to −3. We also don’t know how to place QALYs within this welfare range. When we save a human, should we assume their welfare to be 100 throughout their life?
This also makes it even more crucial to provide a tight technical definition for welfare range so that scientists can place certain experiences within that range.
I suspect he meant something like an improvement of 40 percentage points along the normalized 0-100% scale, so with a scale of −10 to 10, this would be adding 8 to their welfare: 8=40%*(10-(-10)).
(Or it could just be 40 percentage points along the normalized negative part of the welfare scale, so +4 on a scale of −10 to 10.)