While Iâm a big fan of SWP and have donated to them myself, I am skeptical of claims like
This makes [SWP] around 30 times better at reducing suffering and promoting well-being than the highly effective animal charities focused on chicken welfare which themselves are hundreds or thousands of times more effective than the best charities helping humans.
I greatly appreciate @Vasco Grilođ¸ for writing up his analysis, but I donât think that most people would agree with some of the assumptions made in it regarding pain intensity:
For air asphyxiation: time in disabling pain equal to the maximum time during which shrimp can remain alive of 30 min, although Aaron noted he and his colleagues have seen some alive for 6 h; time in excruciating pain as a fraction of that in disabling pain equal to that of ice slurry (0.126 h); time in hurtful pain as a fraction of that in disabling pain equal to that of ice slurry (0.00633 h); and time in annoying pain as a fraction of that in hurtful pain equal to that of ice slurry (0 h).
[...]
Annoying pain is 10 % as intense as fully healthy life.
Hurtful pain is as intense as fully healthy life.
Disabling pain is 10 times as intense as fully healthy life.
Excruciating pain is 100 k times as intense as fully healthy life.
My assumptions for the pain intensities imply each of the following individually neutralise 1 day of fully healthy life:
10 days (= 1â0.1) of annoying pain.
1 day of hurtful pain.
2.40 h (= 24â10) of disabling pain.
0.864 s (= 24*60^2/â(100*10^3)) of excruciating pain.
Vasco estimates that asphyxiating shrimp experience about 7.5 minutes of excruciating pain, and weights this as 10000x worse than disabling pain, which is the maximum pain experienced by a chicken during a keel bone fracture or death from heat exhaustion (in the data used to generate the THL numbers). Moreover, the data he relies on for the cost effectiveness of GiveWell top charities does not allow for the existence of states worse than death. This means that heâs estimating that the pain experienced during asphyxiation is 100000x the worst pain prevented by GiveWell. This seems highly implausible to me. Surely dying of malaria or diarrheal disease involves some pain that is within 100000x the intensity of suffocation (and indeed WFP estimates that sepsis in a chicken involves excruciating pain, so I would expect that sepsis in a human does as well).
None of this is to say that SWP is ineffective, merely that the cost-effectiveness ratios compared to other EA top charities citied here seem overly high to me.
Surely dying of malaria or diarrheal disease involves some pain that is within 100000x the intensity of suffocation (and indeed WFP estimates that sepsis in a chicken involves excruciating pain, so I would expect that sepsis in a human does as well).
Your objection is fair, in that I strongly agree there are states humans can be in that are much worse than death. However, I think the math works out such that the points you raise have a negligible effect on my results. Assuming the human deaths prevented by GiveWellâs top charities are as painful as a fraction of the welfare range of humans as shrimp deaths from air asphyxiation slaughter as a fraction of the welfare range of shrimps, the suffering involved in one death prevented by GiveWellâs top charities would be equivalent to 1.44 DALYs (= 1.26*10^4/â24/â365.25). To estimate the cost-effectiveness of GiveWellâs top charities, I assumed saving one life is as good as averting 51 DALYs:
According to OP [Open Philanthropy], âGiveWell uses moral weights for child deaths that would be consistent with assuming 51 years of foregone life in the DALY framework (though that is not how they reach the conclusion)â.
Consequently, human deaths prevented by GiveWellâs top charities being relatively as painful as shrimp deaths from air asphyxiation would only increase the cost-effectiveness of GiveWellâs top charities by at most 2.82 % (= 1.44/â51). I say at most because GiveWell already partially accounts for the benefits of decreasing morbidity (besides those of decreasing mortality).
This makes [SWP] around 30 times better at reducing suffering and promoting well-being than the highly effective animal charities focused on chicken welfare
I think that ratio underestimates the promise of the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) relative to chicken welfare campaigns. My analysis of SWP uses my updated intensity of disabling pain (10 times as intense as fully healthy life), which is 10 % of my previous intensity that I used in my analysis of chicken welfare campaigns. I plan to post an updated cost-effectiveness analysis of chicken welfare campaigns in 1 or 2 weeks.
Thanks Vasco. After thinking about the numbers myself, I agree that allowing for states worse than death canât on its own do a lot to make the numbers comparable between GiveWell and SWP. I do actually think it would move the numbers more than youâre accounting for there, both because the deaths prevented by GiveWell top charities might involve more than 7.5 minutes of excruciating pain and because GiveWell top charities prevent a lot of morbidity among people who end up surviving (and I think theyâre significantly underweighting the value of this, e.g. clean water interventions prevent about 6 person-years of being sick with waterbone illnesses for everyone person who dies, and I would significantly prefer to be in a dreamless sleep than be conscious with a severe enteric infection.[1] But the DALY weight for severe diarrheal illness is 0.247, implying 3/â4ths the wellbeing[2] of being fully healthy). But this is at most going to change the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell top charities by a factor of 2, not 4 OOMs.
As for the 10000x difference in weights between disabling and excruciating pain, I have to admit Iâm pretty confused here. On the one hand, it strikes me as fundamentally implausible that suffocating is 10000x worse than dying of heatstroke. On the other hand, some of my intuitions do lean towards not being willing to endure e.g. burning to death for almost anything else. Iâll need to spend some time reviewing the literature before I try and make further sense of how to best make these tradeoffs.
Thanks again for all your work and engagement here, I think itâs genuinely quite valuable to be having these conversations!
Iâll need to spend some time reviewing the literature before I try and make further sense of how to best make these tradeoffs.
I had a look at the literature a few weeks ago (skimming some of the studies mentioned here), and, as a result, updated to an intensity of disabling pain 10 % as high as my original one (from 100 to 10 times as intense as fully healthy life). It looks like there are no studies informing the intensity of excruciating pain:
We find it unlikely that the most intense pain experienced is of an Excruciating nature as defined in the Welfare Footprint framework, since this category is by definition associated with extreme and unbearable pain, not tolerated even if for a few seconds (a definition which does not coincide with the description of the patients in the studies above).
Thanks again for all your work and engagement here, I think itâs genuinely quite valuable to be having these conversations!
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 itâs ~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 (= 100â10) 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/â$, which is 99.5 % (= 431â433) of my previous value of 433 DALY/â$. There is basically no change because the cost-effectiveness is approximately proportional to the intensity of excruciating pain, which I have not updated.
I think one could probably push back on whether 7.5 minutes of [extreme] pain is a reasonable estimate for a person who dies from malaria, but I think the bigger potential issue is still that the result of the BOTEC seems highly sensitive to the âexcruciating pain is 100,000 times worse than fully healthy life is goodâ assumptionâfor both air asphyxiation and ice slurry, the time spent under excruciating pain make up more than 99.96% of the total equivalent loss of healthy life.[1]
I alluded to this on your post, but I think your results imply you would prefer to avert 10 shrimp days of excruciating pain (e.g. air asphyxiation /â ice slurry) over saving 1 human life (51 DALYs).[2]
If I use your assumption and also value human excruciating pain as 100,000 times as bad as healthy life is good,[3] then this means you would prefer to save 10 shrimp days of excruciating pain (using your air asphyxiation figures) over 4.5 human hours of excruciating pain,[4] and your shrimp to human ratio is less than 50:1 - that is, you would rather avert 50 shrimp minutes of excruciating pain than 1 human minute of excruciating pain.
To be clear, this isnât a claim that one shouldnât donate to SWP, but just that if you do bite the bullet on those numbers above then Iâd be keen to see some stronger justification beyond âmy guessâ for a BOTEC that leads to results that are so counterintuitive (like Iâm kind of assuming that Iâve missed a step or OOMs in the maths here!), and is so highly sensitive to this assumption.[5]
I think one could probably push back on whether 7.5 minutes of pain is a reasonable estimate for a person who dies from malaria
My calculation above assumed 7.56 min (= 0.126*60) of excruciating pain, not just âpainâ. Examples of excruciating pain include âscalding and severe burning events [in large parts of the body]â, or âdismemberment, or extreme tortureâ.
To be clear, this isnât a claim that one shouldnât donate to SWP, but just that if you do bite the bullet on those numbers above then Iâd be keen to see some stronger justification beyond âmy guessâ for the BOTEC.
I had to guess the intensity of excruciating pain because there is basically no empirical data informing potential estimates.
We find it unlikely that the most intense pain experienced is of an Excruciating nature as defined in the Welfare Footprint framework, since this category is by definition associated with extreme and unbearable pain, not tolerated even if for a few seconds (a definition which does not coincide with the description of the patients in the studies above).
I agree my guess is speculative. However, if one wants to argue that I overestimated the cost-effectiveness of SWP, one has to provide reasons for my guess overestimating the intensity of excruciating pain. I do not think claiming the results are unintuitive is a good way of doing this. In the context of global health and development, it would not make much sense to dismiss GiveWellâs conclusion that one can save a life for 5 k$ just because it is unintuitive that one can save 10 lives for the cost of a BMW. Instead, it would be better to critique the inputs that went into the cost-effectiveness analysis. I know you are doing better than this, because you are critiquing intermediate results instead of the final cost-effectiveness. However, I would say it would be better if you focussed on criticising my assumption that excruciating pain is 100 k times as intense as fully healthy life, or, equivalently, the direct implication that 1 day of fully healthy life is neutralised by 0.864 s (= 24*60^2/â(100*10^3)) of excruciating pain.
Otherwise I could just copy your entire BOTEC, and change the bottom figure to 1000 instead of 100k, and change your topline results by 2 OOMs.
If you did that, SWP would still be 434 (= 43.4*10^3*10^3/â(100*10^3)) times as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities. I think it is also worth wondering about whether you trully believe that updated intensity. Do you think 1 day of fully healthy life plus 86.4 s (= 0.864*100*10^3/â100) of scalding or severe burning events in large parts of the body, dismemberment, or extreme torture would be neutral?
Ah my bad, I meant extreme pain above there as well, edited to clarify! I agree itâs not a super important assumption for the BOTEC in the grand scheme of things though.
However, if one wants to argue that I overestimated the cost-effectiveness of SWP, one has to provide reasons for my guess overestimating the intensity of excruciating pain.
I donât actually argue for this in either of my comments.[1] Iâm just saying that it sounds like if I duplicated your BOTEC, and changed this one speculative parameter to 2 OOMs lower, an observer would have no strong reason to choose one BOTEC over another just by looking at the BOTEC alone. Expressing skepticism of an unproven claim doesnât produce a symmetrical burden of proof on my end!
Mainly just from a reasoning transparency point of view I think itâs worth fleshing out what these assumptions imply and what is grounding these best guesses[2] - in part because I personally want to know how much I should update based on your BOTEC, in part because knowing your reasoning might help me better argue why you might (or might not) have overestimated the intensity of excruciating pain if I knew where your ratio came from (and this is why I was checking the maths and seeing if these were correct, and asking if thereâs stronger evidence if so, before critiquing the 100k figure), and because I think other EAF readers, as well as broader, lower-context audience of EA bloggers would benefit from this too.
If you did that, SWP would still be 434 (= 43.4*10^3*10^3/â(100*10^3)) times as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities.
Yeah, I wasnât making any inter-charity comparisons or claiming that SWP is less cost-effective than GW top charities![3] But since you mention it, it wouldnât be surprising to me if losing 2 OOMs might make some donors favour other animal welfare charities over SWP for exampleâbut again, the primary purpose of these comments is not to litigate which charity is the best, or whether this is better or worse than GW top charities, but mainly just to explore a bit more around what is grounding the BOTEC, so observers have a good sense on how much they should update based on how compelling they find the assumptions /â reasoning etc.
I think it is also worth wondering about whether you trully believe that updated intensity. Do you think 1 day of fully healthy life plus 86.4 s (= 0.864*100*10^3/â100) of scalding or severe burning events in large parts of the body, dismemberment, or extreme torture would be neutral?
Nope! I would rather give up 1 day of healthy life than 86 seconds of this description. But this varies depending on the timeframe in question.
For example, Iâd probably be willing to endure 0.86 seconds of this for 14 minutes of healthy life, and I would definitely endure 0.086 seconds of this than give up 86 seconds of healthy life.
And using your assumptions (ratio of 100k), I would easily rather have 0.8 seconds of this than give up 1 day of healthy life, but if I had to endure many hours of this I could imagine my tradeoffs approaching, or even exceeding 100k.
I do want to mention that I think itâs useful that someone is trying to quantify these comparisons, Iâm grateful for this work, and I want to emphasise that these are about making the underlying reasoning more transparent /â understanding the methodology that leads to the assumptions in the BOTEC, rather than any kind of personal criticism!
Thanks, Bruce! Makes sense. I have now clarified in the post that the guesses for the pain intensities come from my personal time trade-offs:
My assumptions for the pain intensities are guesses for my personal time trade-offs, and imply each of the following individually neutralise 1 day of fully healthy life:
Nope! I would rather give up 1 day of healthy life than 86 seconds of this description. But this varies depending on the timeframe in question.
For example, Iâd probably be willing to endure 0.86 seconds of this for 14 minutes of healthy life, and I would definitely endure 0.086 seconds of this than give up 86 seconds of healthy life.
0.1 s of excruciating pain intuitively passes very quickly, so I can easily imagine it being less than 100 times as bad as 10 s (= 0.1*100) of excruciating pain. However, I think intuitions like this are misguided holding the intensity of pain constant (i.e. only varying duration). For example, if 1 min in strong pain is 100 times as bad as 1 min in weak pain, and strong and weak pain have each a constant intensity (instead of referring to ranges of intensities), N min in strong pain should be 100 times as bad as N min in weak pain. Saying otherwise implies that the badness of 1 min in strong pain depends on how many minutes of strong pain preceded that 1 min, which contradicts the assumption that strong pain has a constant intensity.
I think 0.1 s of excruciating pain does not feel bad because one wrongly imagines the memory of the pain afterwards, which may not be so bad because 0.1 s is too little time to form memories. In addition, one may imagine that some time is needed to reach the intensity of excruciating pain, such that only a small fraction of the 0.1 s are actually excruciating pain, but the thought experiment requires 0.1 s of actual excruciating pain.
(Crossposted from twitter)
While Iâm a big fan of SWP and have donated to them myself, I am skeptical of claims like
I greatly appreciate @Vasco Grilođ¸ for writing up his analysis, but I donât think that most people would agree with some of the assumptions made in it regarding pain intensity:
Vasco estimates that asphyxiating shrimp experience about 7.5 minutes of excruciating pain, and weights this as 10000x worse than disabling pain, which is the maximum pain experienced by a chicken during a keel bone fracture or death from heat exhaustion (in the data used to generate the THL numbers). Moreover, the data he relies on for the cost effectiveness of GiveWell top charities does not allow for the existence of states worse than death. This means that heâs estimating that the pain experienced during asphyxiation is 100000x the worst pain prevented by GiveWell. This seems highly implausible to me. Surely dying of malaria or diarrheal disease involves some pain that is within 100000x the intensity of suffocation (and indeed WFP estimates that sepsis in a chicken involves excruciating pain, so I would expect that sepsis in a human does as well).
None of this is to say that SWP is ineffective, merely that the cost-effectiveness ratios compared to other EA top charities citied here seem overly high to me.
Thanks, Matt!
Your objection is fair, in that I strongly agree there are states humans can be in that are much worse than death. However, I think the math works out such that the points you raise have a negligible effect on my results. Assuming the human deaths prevented by GiveWellâs top charities are as painful as a fraction of the welfare range of humans as shrimp deaths from air asphyxiation slaughter as a fraction of the welfare range of shrimps, the suffering involved in one death prevented by GiveWellâs top charities would be equivalent to 1.44 DALYs (= 1.26*10^4/â24/â365.25). To estimate the cost-effectiveness of GiveWellâs top charities, I assumed saving one life is as good as averting 51 DALYs:
Consequently, human deaths prevented by GiveWellâs top charities being relatively as painful as shrimp deaths from air asphyxiation would only increase the cost-effectiveness of GiveWellâs top charities by at most 2.82 % (= 1.44/â51). I say at most because GiveWell already partially accounts for the benefits of decreasing morbidity (besides those of decreasing mortality).
I think that ratio underestimates the promise of the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) relative to chicken welfare campaigns. My analysis of SWP uses my updated intensity of disabling pain (10 times as intense as fully healthy life), which is 10 % of my previous intensity that I used in my analysis of chicken welfare campaigns. I plan to post an updated cost-effectiveness analysis of chicken welfare campaigns in 1 or 2 weeks.
Thanks Vasco. After thinking about the numbers myself, I agree that allowing for states worse than death canât on its own do a lot to make the numbers comparable between GiveWell and SWP. I do actually think it would move the numbers more than youâre accounting for there, both because the deaths prevented by GiveWell top charities might involve more than 7.5 minutes of excruciating pain and because GiveWell top charities prevent a lot of morbidity among people who end up surviving (and I think theyâre significantly underweighting the value of this, e.g. clean water interventions prevent about 6 person-years of being sick with waterbone illnesses for everyone person who dies, and I would significantly prefer to be in a dreamless sleep than be conscious with a severe enteric infection.[1] But the DALY weight for severe diarrheal illness is 0.247, implying 3/â4ths the wellbeing[2] of being fully healthy). But this is at most going to change the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell top charities by a factor of 2, not 4 OOMs.
As for the 10000x difference in weights between disabling and excruciating pain, I have to admit Iâm pretty confused here. On the one hand, it strikes me as fundamentally implausible that suffocating is 10000x worse than dying of heatstroke. On the other hand, some of my intuitions do lean towards not being willing to endure e.g. burning to death for almost anything else. Iâll need to spend some time reviewing the literature before I try and make further sense of how to best make these tradeoffs.
Thanks again for all your work and engagement here, I think itâs genuinely quite valuable to be having these conversations!
I took some notes on my willingness to make these tradeoffs when I was recently sick with norovirus and am hoping to write a short post on this soon!
DALY weights are a measure of health status, not wellbeing, but that hasnât stopped anyone from using them as a unit of wellbeing
I had a look at the literature a few weeks ago (skimming some of the studies mentioned here), and, as a result, updated to an intensity of disabling pain 10 % as high as my original one (from 100 to 10 times as intense as fully healthy life). It looks like there are no studies informing the intensity of excruciating pain:
Likewise. Thanks, Matt!
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 itâs ~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.
I think one could probably push back on whether 7.5 minutes of [extreme] pain is a reasonable estimate for a person who dies from malaria, but I think the bigger potential issue is still that the result of the BOTEC seems highly sensitive to the âexcruciating pain is 100,000 times worse than fully healthy life is goodâ assumptionâfor both air asphyxiation and ice slurry, the time spent under excruciating pain make up more than 99.96% of the total equivalent loss of healthy life.[1]
I alluded to this on your post, but I think your results imply you would prefer to avert 10 shrimp days of excruciating pain (e.g. air asphyxiation /â ice slurry) over saving 1 human life (51 DALYs).[2]
If I use your assumption and also value human excruciating pain as 100,000 times as bad as healthy life is good,[3] then this means you would prefer to save 10 shrimp days of excruciating pain (using your air asphyxiation figures) over 4.5 human hours of excruciating pain,[4] and your shrimp to human ratio is less than 50:1 - that is, you would rather avert 50 shrimp minutes of excruciating pain than 1 human minute of excruciating pain.
To be clear, this isnât a claim that one shouldnât donate to SWP, but just that if you do bite the bullet on those numbers above then Iâd be keen to see some stronger justification beyond âmy guessâ for a BOTEC that leads to results that are so counterintuitive (like Iâm kind of assuming that Iâve missed a step or OOMs in the maths here!), and is so highly sensitive to this assumption.[5]
Air asphyxiation: 1- (5.01 /â 12,605.01) = 0.9996
Ice slurry: 1 - (0.24 /â 604.57) = 0.9996
1770 * 7.5 = 13275 shrimp minutes
13275 /â 60 /â 24 = 9.21875 shrimp days
There are arguments in either direction, but thatâs probably not a super productive line of discussion.
51 * 365.25 * 24 * 60 = 26,823,960 human minutes
26,823,960 /â 100,000 = 268.2396 human minutes of excruciating pain
268.2396 /â 60 = 4.47 human hours of excruciating pain
13275 /â 268.2396 = 49.49 (shrimp : human ratio)
Otherwise I could just copy your entire BOTEC, and change the bottom figure to 1000 instead of 100k, and change your topline results by 2 OOMs.
Thanks, Bruce.
My calculation above assumed 7.56 min (= 0.126*60) of excruciating pain, not just âpainâ. Examples of excruciating pain include âscalding and severe burning events [in large parts of the body]â, or âdismemberment, or extreme tortureâ.
I had to guess the intensity of excruciating pain because there is basically no empirical data informing potential estimates.
I agree my guess is speculative. However, if one wants to argue that I overestimated the cost-effectiveness of SWP, one has to provide reasons for my guess overestimating the intensity of excruciating pain. I do not think claiming the results are unintuitive is a good way of doing this. In the context of global health and development, it would not make much sense to dismiss GiveWellâs conclusion that one can save a life for 5 k$ just because it is unintuitive that one can save 10 lives for the cost of a BMW. Instead, it would be better to critique the inputs that went into the cost-effectiveness analysis. I know you are doing better than this, because you are critiquing intermediate results instead of the final cost-effectiveness. However, I would say it would be better if you focussed on criticising my assumption that excruciating pain is 100 k times as intense as fully healthy life, or, equivalently, the direct implication that 1 day of fully healthy life is neutralised by 0.864 s (= 24*60^2/â(100*10^3)) of excruciating pain.
If you did that, SWP would still be 434 (= 43.4*10^3*10^3/â(100*10^3)) times as cost-effective as GiveWellâs top charities. I think it is also worth wondering about whether you trully believe that updated intensity. Do you think 1 day of fully healthy life plus 86.4 s (= 0.864*100*10^3/â100) of scalding or severe burning events in large parts of the body, dismemberment, or extreme torture would be neutral?
Ah my bad, I meant extreme pain above there as well, edited to clarify! I agree itâs not a super important assumption for the BOTEC in the grand scheme of things though.
I donât actually argue for this in either of my comments.[1] Iâm just saying that it sounds like if I duplicated your BOTEC, and changed this one speculative parameter to 2 OOMs lower, an observer would have no strong reason to choose one BOTEC over another just by looking at the BOTEC alone. Expressing skepticism of an unproven claim doesnât produce a symmetrical burden of proof on my end!
Mainly just from a reasoning transparency point of view I think itâs worth fleshing out what these assumptions imply and what is grounding these best guesses[2] - in part because I personally want to know how much I should update based on your BOTEC, in part because knowing your reasoning might help me better argue why you might (or might not) have overestimated the intensity of excruciating pain if I knew where your ratio came from (and this is why I was checking the maths and seeing if these were correct, and asking if thereâs stronger evidence if so, before critiquing the 100k figure), and because I think other EAF readers, as well as broader, lower-context audience of EA bloggers would benefit from this too.
Yeah, I wasnât making any inter-charity comparisons or claiming that SWP is less cost-effective than GW top charities![3] But since you mention it, it wouldnât be surprising to me if losing 2 OOMs might make some donors favour other animal welfare charities over SWP for exampleâbut again, the primary purpose of these comments is not to litigate which charity is the best, or whether this is better or worse than GW top charities, but mainly just to explore a bit more around what is grounding the BOTEC, so observers have a good sense on how much they should update based on how compelling they find the assumptions /â reasoning etc.
Nope! I would rather give up 1 day of healthy life than 86 seconds of this description. But this varies depending on the timeframe in question.
For example, Iâd probably be willing to endure 0.86 seconds of this for 14 minutes of healthy life, and I would definitely endure 0.086 seconds of this than give up 86 seconds of healthy life.
And using your assumptions (ratio of 100k), I would easily rather have 0.8 seconds of this than give up 1 day of healthy life, but if I had to endure many hours of this I could imagine my tradeoffs approaching, or even exceeding 100k.
I do want to mention that I think itâs useful that someone is trying to quantify these comparisons, Iâm grateful for this work, and I want to emphasise that these are about making the underlying reasoning more transparent /â understanding the methodology that leads to the assumptions in the BOTEC, rather than any kind of personal criticism!
Though I am personally skeptical of a 50:1 shrimp:human tradeoff
E.g. is this the result of a personal time trade-off exercise?
I explicitly say âTo be clear, this isnât a claim that one shouldnât donate to SWPâ. Iâm a big fan of SWP!
Thanks, Bruce! Makes sense. I have now clarified in the post that the guesses for the pain intensities come from my personal time trade-offs:
0.1 s of excruciating pain intuitively passes very quickly, so I can easily imagine it being less than 100 times as bad as 10 s (= 0.1*100) of excruciating pain. However, I think intuitions like this are misguided holding the intensity of pain constant (i.e. only varying duration). For example, if 1 min in strong pain is 100 times as bad as 1 min in weak pain, and strong and weak pain have each a constant intensity (instead of referring to ranges of intensities), N min in strong pain should be 100 times as bad as N min in weak pain. Saying otherwise implies that the badness of 1 min in strong pain depends on how many minutes of strong pain preceded that 1 min, which contradicts the assumption that strong pain has a constant intensity.
I think 0.1 s of excruciating pain does not feel bad because one wrongly imagines the memory of the pain afterwards, which may not be so bad because 0.1 s is too little time to form memories. In addition, one may imagine that some time is needed to reach the intensity of excruciating pain, such that only a small fraction of the 0.1 s are actually excruciating pain, but the thought experiment requires 0.1 s of actual excruciating pain.
Published.