Thanks for your clear question! You’re right, I should have been much clearer in what I meant.
Concretely, I was thinking about the cumulative pain framework, and how it has 4 different intensities of pain (Annoying, Hurtful, Disabling, and Excruciating), and what the relative unpleasantness of the levels might be.
And in this post I was trying to understand how the moral-weight numbers would interact with the pain-intensity-weightings (whether they should apply to the duration or the intensity dimension, as that makes a big difference).
Did this answer your question, or was there a more fundamental crux I missed?
I’m open to the idea that I’m barking up the wrong tree. It’s been a few years since I really sat down to think all this through.
If the claim is that the gap between ‘Disabling’ and ‘Excruciating’ should be larger than the gap between ‘Annoying’ and ‘Hurtful’, then that makes sense to me, and seems interesting.
But it sounds like this wasn’t a numerical scale to begin with? So this again just feels like a claim about how we should go about assigning numbers to those categories (if we need numbers), rather than a claim that pain unpleasantness is ‘superlinear’ in some objective sense?
Defining what a numerical score for pain means seems like a hard problem. From my perspective, it seems like it should be defined so that the being concerned would be indifferent between a day of 2*x and 2 days of x. I think this is the notion you are referring to as ‘unpleasantness’. The question then for any other pain metric is just: “how well does it measure this?”. I’m still not sure it makes sense to ask “How does pain intensity scale with unpleasantness?”, since then we would first have to define a numerical scale for pain intensity in some different way, and I’m still not sure how we begin to do that?
I suppose there is another ineresting complication here, which is that you could also try to define your pain scale in terms of preferences among gambles. For example, the pain scale should be defined so that a rational being is indifferent between 100% chance of x and a 50% chance of 2*x. And then you’re confronted with the question of whether this should give you the same answer as defining it in terms of preferences among durations. My feeling is that it should be the same (something about personal identity not being a ‘further fact’ and applying standard utilitarian aggregation approach to person-moments rather than persons..?) but would be interesting to explore points of view where those two potential scale definitions are different. That doesn’t feel quite the same as ‘intensity’ vs ‘unpleasantness’ though. More like two different definitions of ‘unpleasantness’.
Ah, I see where you’re coming from. You’re saying that the real problem is deciding where to place the intensity categories (Annoying, Hurtful, etc) on the number line of pain, instead of pretending those categories make their own dimension called intensity, and mapping them to another thing called unpleasentness.
The way I was thinking about it:
The way you’re thinking about it:
I think the reason I was drawn to the intensity perspective is because for humans it seems real, and that’s where we have our best understanding (due to the advantages of self-report, more pyschophysics studies, introspecting on our own experiences), and so I was thinking about translating our (still very limited) understanding of that model to the non-human space. But maybe you’re right that it would be better to build a simpler model from scratch around the non-human limitations.
I like the property of the pain scale you mentioned where it scales linearly with time and duration. That would mean the whole ambiguity of the moral-weights/log-pain intersection that this post was about would disappear. And yes, I share your intuition that it would be the same as your gambling property (although would also be interested in any special cases where they come apart).
Thanks for pushing me on this, it helped clarify my own vague thoughts about it!
Thanks for your clear question! You’re right, I should have been much clearer in what I meant.
Concretely, I was thinking about the cumulative pain framework, and how it has 4 different intensities of pain (Annoying, Hurtful, Disabling, and Excruciating), and what the relative unpleasantness of the levels might be.
There’s a longer report here about that question, and I’m very sympathetic to the view that the 4 pain ratings should increase in a very superlinear way https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/C2qiY9hwH3Xuirce3/short-agony-or-long-ache-comparing-sources-of-suffering-that
And in this post I was trying to understand how the moral-weight numbers would interact with the pain-intensity-weightings (whether they should apply to the duration or the intensity dimension, as that makes a big difference).
Did this answer your question, or was there a more fundamental crux I missed?
I’m open to the idea that I’m barking up the wrong tree. It’s been a few years since I really sat down to think all this through.
Thank you for your reply and clarification!
If the claim is that the gap between ‘Disabling’ and ‘Excruciating’ should be larger than the gap between ‘Annoying’ and ‘Hurtful’, then that makes sense to me, and seems interesting.
But it sounds like this wasn’t a numerical scale to begin with? So this again just feels like a claim about how we should go about assigning numbers to those categories (if we need numbers), rather than a claim that pain unpleasantness is ‘superlinear’ in some objective sense?
Defining what a numerical score for pain means seems like a hard problem. From my perspective, it seems like it should be defined so that the being concerned would be indifferent between a day of 2*x and 2 days of x. I think this is the notion you are referring to as ‘unpleasantness’. The question then for any other pain metric is just: “how well does it measure this?”. I’m still not sure it makes sense to ask “How does pain intensity scale with unpleasantness?”, since then we would first have to define a numerical scale for pain intensity in some different way, and I’m still not sure how we begin to do that?
I suppose there is another ineresting complication here, which is that you could also try to define your pain scale in terms of preferences among gambles. For example, the pain scale should be defined so that a rational being is indifferent between 100% chance of x and a 50% chance of 2*x. And then you’re confronted with the question of whether this should give you the same answer as defining it in terms of preferences among durations. My feeling is that it should be the same (something about personal identity not being a ‘further fact’ and applying standard utilitarian aggregation approach to person-moments rather than persons..?) but would be interesting to explore points of view where those two potential scale definitions are different. That doesn’t feel quite the same as ‘intensity’ vs ‘unpleasantness’ though. More like two different definitions of ‘unpleasantness’.
Ah, I see where you’re coming from. You’re saying that the real problem is deciding where to place the intensity categories (Annoying, Hurtful, etc) on the number line of pain, instead of pretending those categories make their own dimension called intensity, and mapping them to another thing called unpleasentness.
The way I was thinking about it:
The way you’re thinking about it:
I think the reason I was drawn to the intensity perspective is because for humans it seems real, and that’s where we have our best understanding (due to the advantages of self-report, more pyschophysics studies, introspecting on our own experiences), and so I was thinking about translating our (still very limited) understanding of that model to the non-human space. But maybe you’re right that it would be better to build a simpler model from scratch around the non-human limitations.
I like the property of the pain scale you mentioned where it scales linearly with time and duration. That would mean the whole ambiguity of the moral-weights/log-pain intersection that this post was about would disappear. And yes, I share your intuition that it would be the same as your gambling property (although would also be interested in any special cases where they come apart).
Thanks for pushing me on this, it helped clarify my own vague thoughts about it!