Well written. I think the point on the badness of excruciating-level pain is really underemphasized, and would like to write a post about that at some point.
I’d love to try surveying the general population with thought experiments to find people’s empirical tradeoffs of pain levels. My personal intuitions are definitely closer to your weights than Rethink’s. I think a survey would be really valuable since it would provide probability distributions of pain level conversions which could augment a cross-cause model.
I’d love to try surveying the general population with thought experiments to find people’s empirical tradeoffs of pain levels.
It looks like the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS) is looking into this:
Suffering survey We are currently working on a quantitative overview and visualisation of world suffering, including both humans and non-human animals. As part of this study, in September 2024 we launched a survey to assess intensity and duration of suffering in humans across a range of conditions and situations. The survey also asks questions about the nature of the suffering and any measures that were found to be effective in relieving it. The survey will remain open at least until the end of 2024.
The survey is mainly multiple-choice, takes about 5-15 minutes to complete, and can be filled out anonymously. Anyone who has experienced significant suffering, physical or psychological, in the past or present, can participate, and provide information on 1-3 life conditions. We would be grateful if you would consider participating and also sharing it widely within your network!
This is all highly speculative, and here’s my highly speculatory speculation.
I agree excruciating pain is very very bad andi might lean towards your numbers vasco rather than OPs for very short periods of time in that kind of pain
I just find it highly questionable that animals both experience anything like that level of pain a while also experiencing it for very long periods of time. Can they dissociate? are they numbed?
Even for lesser amounts of pain, given how continuous it is over time in horrendous battery farms there’s a decent chance of some kind of numbing or dissociation thing going on which might reduce the total suffering in the long term.
But I say this very cautiously and it probably wouldn’t matter a huge difference in calculations anyway.
As you wrote, there’s no view on this I’m confident in. But speaking from having had certain enduring experiences of suffering, like being very sick for weeks on end, or being bullied at school for years, at times life can just be enduringly awful. Yes, one can develop certain coping mechanisms to make the bad times easier to bear, but if the bad times are bad enough, I think they do just make life consistently far worse. Evidence from an earlier post of mine:
Extreme pain or discomfort reduces health-related quality of life by 41%.
Nerve damage results in a loss of health-related quality of life between 39% for diabetes-caused nerve damage and 85% for failed back surgery syndrome.
Suffering from cluster headaches is associated with greatly increased suicidality.
Patients suffering from chronic musculoskeletal pain would rather take a gamble with a ⅕ chance of dying and a ⅘ chance of being cured than continue living with their condition.
I also think that many coping mechanisms (e.g. “I’m suffering for a cause! Or for my children!” etc) are mostly possible because the suffering being has higher order brain function which allows those complex ideas to have similar mental sway to the feeling of suffering. So it feels plausible to me that a chicken would have a harder time “coping” with suffering than a human in an equivalent situation.
To quantify my subjective and very uncertain feelings on the matter, I’d put a 40-80% probability that coping mechanisms don’t reduce chickens’ suffering by more than 50% relative to the undiluted experience. But I think reasonable people can have all sorts of views on this, and would love to see further research.
“Extreme pain or discomfort reduces health-related quality of life by 41%.
“Nerve damage results in a loss of health-related quality of life between 39% for diabetes-caused nerve damage and 85% for failed back surgery syndrome.”
This makes sense—one interesting point here is that failed back surgery syndrome and severe nerve damage are some of the more severe and chronic pains humans suffer (makes me shudder thinking about it TBH, have a couple of friends who have suffered from that) yet people still lead “net positive” lives with the pain and usually want to keep living.
“I also think that many coping mechanisms (e.g. “I’m suffering for a cause! Or for my children!” etc) are mostly possible because the suffering being has higher order brain function which allows those complex ideas to have similar mental sway to the feeling of suffering. So it feels plausible to me that a chicken would have a harder time “coping” with suffering than a human in an equivalent situation.” That’s true—its also true that human’s complex ideas lead us vulnerable to complex mental health issues which can modulate pain to make it worse. I’d be so uncertain as to be 50⁄50 on whether modulation effects would be worse for humans.
”To quantify my subjective and very uncertain feelings on the matter, I’d put a 40-80% probability that coping mechanisms don’t reduce chickens’ suffering by more than 50%” - This sounds fair enough
Well written. I think the point on the badness of excruciating-level pain is really underemphasized, and would like to write a post about that at some point.
I’d love to try surveying the general population with thought experiments to find people’s empirical tradeoffs of pain levels. My personal intuitions are definitely closer to your weights than Rethink’s. I think a survey would be really valuable since it would provide probability distributions of pain level conversions which could augment a cross-cause model.
In case it’s useful, Adam Shriver and I ran a workshop about this issue with some pain scientists and animal welfare scientists, and reported some of our findings here: https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/dimensions-of-pain-workshop-summary-and-updated-conclusions. Welfare Footprint also wrote about it recently: https://welfarefootprint.org/2024/02/20/shortagony-or-longache/. Both reports cover some of the relevant survey data.
Also, I have found it useful to directly incorporate uncertainty about the appropriate severity weights directly into welfare footprint-style models, as we recently did for shrimp aquaculture welfare threats: https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/quantifying-and-prioritizing-shrimp-welfare-threats
Thanks, Ariel.
It looks like the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS) is looking into this:
I have just completed it, and it took me 15 min.
I forgot to say OPIS’ survey did not look into the types of pain defined by the Welfare Footprint Project.
This is all highly speculative, and here’s my highly speculatory speculation.
I agree excruciating pain is very very bad andi might lean towards your numbers vasco rather than OPs for very short periods of time in that kind of pain
I just find it highly questionable that animals both experience anything like that level of pain a while also experiencing it for very long periods of time. Can they dissociate? are they numbed?
Even for lesser amounts of pain, given how continuous it is over time in horrendous battery farms there’s a decent chance of some kind of numbing or dissociation thing going on which might reduce the total suffering in the long term.
But I say this very cautiously and it probably wouldn’t matter a huge difference in calculations anyway.
As you wrote, there’s no view on this I’m confident in. But speaking from having had certain enduring experiences of suffering, like being very sick for weeks on end, or being bullied at school for years, at times life can just be enduringly awful. Yes, one can develop certain coping mechanisms to make the bad times easier to bear, but if the bad times are bad enough, I think they do just make life consistently far worse. Evidence from an earlier post of mine:
Extreme pain or discomfort reduces health-related quality of life by 41%.
Nerve damage results in a loss of health-related quality of life between 39% for diabetes-caused nerve damage and 85% for failed back surgery syndrome.
Suffering from cluster headaches is associated with greatly increased suicidality.
Patients suffering from chronic musculoskeletal pain would rather take a gamble with a ⅕ chance of dying and a ⅘ chance of being cured than continue living with their condition.
I also think that many coping mechanisms (e.g. “I’m suffering for a cause! Or for my children!” etc) are mostly possible because the suffering being has higher order brain function which allows those complex ideas to have similar mental sway to the feeling of suffering. So it feels plausible to me that a chicken would have a harder time “coping” with suffering than a human in an equivalent situation.
To quantify my subjective and very uncertain feelings on the matter, I’d put a 40-80% probability that coping mechanisms don’t reduce chickens’ suffering by more than 50% relative to the undiluted experience. But I think reasonable people can have all sorts of views on this, and would love to see further research.
“Extreme pain or discomfort reduces health-related quality of life by 41%.
“Nerve damage results in a loss of health-related quality of life between 39% for diabetes-caused nerve damage and 85% for failed back surgery syndrome.”
This makes sense—one interesting point here is that failed back surgery syndrome and severe nerve damage are some of the more severe and chronic pains humans suffer (makes me shudder thinking about it TBH, have a couple of friends who have suffered from that) yet people still lead “net positive” lives with the pain and usually want to keep living.
“I also think that many coping mechanisms (e.g. “I’m suffering for a cause! Or for my children!” etc) are mostly possible because the suffering being has higher order brain function which allows those complex ideas to have similar mental sway to the feeling of suffering. So it feels plausible to me that a chicken would have a harder time “coping” with suffering than a human in an equivalent situation.” That’s true—its also true that human’s complex ideas lead us vulnerable to complex mental health issues which can modulate pain to make it worse. I’d be so uncertain as to be 50⁄50 on whether modulation effects would be worse for humans.
”To quantify my subjective and very uncertain feelings on the matter, I’d put a 40-80% probability that coping mechanisms don’t reduce chickens’ suffering by more than 50%”
- This sounds fair enough