I liked your analysis. No worries if this would be too difficult, but it might be helpful to make a website where you can easily switch around the numbers surrounding how the different kinds of suffering compare to each other and plug in the result.
I agree with most of your estimates but I think you probably underrated how bad disabling pain is. Probably it’s ~500 times worse than normal life. Not sure how that would affect the calculations.
Thanks, Omnizoid. Feel free to update my sheet with yout own numbers (although I understand a website would be more handy). If you like me think that excruciating pain is super bad, the cost-effectiveness is essentially proportional to the intensity of excruciating pain (the intensity of disabling pain does not matter), and the welfare range of shrimp. So, for example, if you think excruciating pain is 10 % as intense as I do, and you believe the welfare range of shrimp is 2 times as high as I assumed, then the cost-effectiveness would become 20 % (= 0.1*2) as high.
I tried to do that but ended up a bit confused about what numbers I was using for stuff (I never really properly learned how spreadsheets worked). If I agree with you about the badness of excruciating pain but think you underrated disabling pain by ~1 order of magnitude, do the results still turn out with shrimp welfare beating other stuff?
I was previously assuming disabling pain to be 100 times as intense as fully healthy life, i.e. 10 (= 100⁄10) times as intense as I am assuming now. I updated after going through the studies discussed here, especially Wallenstein et. al (1980). According to this, it looks like disabling pain is 8.16 to 18.8 times as bad as annoying pain, whereas I was supposing disabling pain to be 1 k times as bad as annoying pain. Now I am assuming disabling pain is 100 times (= 10^2) as bad as annoying pain, which is still more intense than the suggested by the study, but not so much so.
My updated past cost-effectiveness of HSI is 431 DALY/$, which is 99.5 % (= 431⁄433) of my previous value of 433 DALY/$. There is basically no change because the cost-effectiveness is approximately proportional to the intensity of excruciating pain, which I have not updated.
I liked your analysis. No worries if this would be too difficult, but it might be helpful to make a website where you can easily switch around the numbers surrounding how the different kinds of suffering compare to each other and plug in the result.
I agree with most of your estimates but I think you probably underrated how bad disabling pain is. Probably it’s ~500 times worse than normal life. Not sure how that would affect the calculations.
Thanks, Omnizoid. Feel free to update my sheet with yout own numbers (although I understand a website would be more handy). If you like me think that excruciating pain is super bad, the cost-effectiveness is essentially proportional to the intensity of excruciating pain (the intensity of disabling pain does not matter), and the welfare range of shrimp. So, for example, if you think excruciating pain is 10 % as intense as I do, and you believe the welfare range of shrimp is 2 times as high as I assumed, then the cost-effectiveness would become 20 % (= 0.1*2) as high.
I tried to do that but ended up a bit confused about what numbers I was using for stuff (I never really properly learned how spreadsheets worked). If I agree with you about the badness of excruciating pain but think you underrated disabling pain by ~1 order of magnitude, do the results still turn out with shrimp welfare beating other stuff?
Yes:
Gotcha, makes sense! And I now see how to manipulate the spreadsheet.