Thanks for your suggestion on how to present CEAs, weāll think about this further.
Great.
I think that existing disagregated (non scaled) metrics already allow us to make reasonable guesses for what is cost effective to help animals.
A greater spread of pain intensities would update me (at the margin) towards prioritising very painful welfare issues happening over a short time (in particular, just before slaughter) over less painful ones affecting the whole life of animals
I also wonder whether there are cases where the time in less intense pain is decreased cost-effectively, but the time in more intense pain is increased. In such cases, one would have to rely on views about pain intensities to determine whether there is a reduction in pain. The Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI) estimates that cage-free layers experience less annoying and hurtful pain than ones in furnished cages, but that it is unclear whether they experience more or less disabling and excruciating pain. āThe analysis primarily aimed to estimate the minimum welfare improvement associated with transitioning to cage-free housingā. So it could be that cage-free layers also experience less disabling and excruciating pain. However, if this remains unclear accounting for all welfare issues as accurately as possible, and one believes disabling and excruciating pain are much more intense than annoying and hurtful pain, it could be unclear whether cage-free egg campaigns decrease or increase pain.
I am not confident that we will ever gain lots of clarity on scaling, as there are lots of known unknowns and reasonable disagreements on questions up and downstream from how to scale things (sentience, range, etc.)
I am also not confident. However, I think there is high value of information in making at least one good attempt to quantify the intensity of excruciating pain.
Given the subjective nature of pain, I am not convinced a survey sampling from such a specific group is particularly externally valid (I also donāt know that any survey of humans will ever be externally valid to how weād scale pain across other animals).
I agree comparisons across different pain intensities and species will remain very uncertain.
People could then change the pain intensity ratios, and sentience-adjusted welfare range to get their own estimates if they want.
Here is a comment from Bob Fischer with context about the uncertainty in the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges Rethink Priorities (RP) initially presented, and the similar ones in Bobās related book which I understand inform your own estimates a lot.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Great.
A greater spread of pain intensities would update me (at the margin) towards prioritising very painful welfare issues happening over a short time (in particular, just before slaughter) over less painful ones affecting the whole life of animals
I also wonder whether there are cases where the time in less intense pain is decreased cost-effectively, but the time in more intense pain is increased. In such cases, one would have to rely on views about pain intensities to determine whether there is a reduction in pain. The Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI) estimates that cage-free layers experience less annoying and hurtful pain than ones in furnished cages, but that it is unclear whether they experience more or less disabling and excruciating pain. āThe analysis primarily aimed to estimate the minimum welfare improvement associated with transitioning to cage-free housingā. So it could be that cage-free layers also experience less disabling and excruciating pain. However, if this remains unclear accounting for all welfare issues as accurately as possible, and one believes disabling and excruciating pain are much more intense than annoying and hurtful pain, it could be unclear whether cage-free egg campaigns decrease or increase pain.
I am also not confident. However, I think there is high value of information in making at least one good attempt to quantify the intensity of excruciating pain.
I agree comparisons across different pain intensities and species will remain very uncertain.
Here is a comment from Bob Fischer with context about the uncertainty in the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges Rethink Priorities (RP) initially presented, and the similar ones in Bobās related book which I understand inform your own estimates a lot.