The closest thing we can make to a hedonium shockwave with current technology is a farm of many small animals that are made as happy as possible. Presumably the animals are cared for by people who know a lot about their psychology and welfare and can make sure they’re happy. One plausible species choice is rats, because rats are small (and therefore easy to take care of and don’t consume a lot of resources), definitively sentient, and we have a reasonable idea of how to make them happy.
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Thus creating 1 rat QALY costs $120 per year, which is $240 per human QALY per year.
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This is just a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation so it should not be taken literally, but I’m still surprised by how cost-inefficient this looks. I expected rat farms to be highly cost-effective based on the fact that most people don’t care about rats, and generally the less people care about some group, the easier it is to help that group. (It’s easier to help developing-world humans than developed-world humans, and easier still to help factory-farmed animals.) Again, I could be completely wrong about these calculations, but rat farms look less promising than I had expected.
I think this is a good example of something seeming like a plausible idea for making the world better, but which turned out to seem pretty ineffective.
In an old post, Michael Dickens writes:
I think this is a good example of something seeming like a plausible idea for making the world better, but which turned out to seem pretty ineffective.