Previously worked as Chief of Staff at the Institute for Law & AI (formerly Legal Priorities Project) and as COO at the Center on Long-Term Risk (formerly Effective Altruism Foundation). I also co-founded EA Munich in 2015. I have a PhD in Computational Science from TU Munich.
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Thanks so much for your comment!
Actually, someone else brought up this point separately, so I agree thereâs more to say here. Iâd love to dig deeper into this question and possibly write a paper on the topic (e.g. for this collection). If you have literature to recommend (either by you or otherwise), please send it my way. And also let me know if youâd like to get involved in such a project. :)
Gee, not sure what happened thereâthanks for pointing that out! Iâve edited the footnote.
Thank you for your comment, Tim!
Indeed, the choice of e is arbitrary and used for illustration purposes. And the base 6 is simply the choice for which the total burden of CH is larger than that of migraines, so itâs also not derived from first principles. This footnote is relevant:
The resulting scaling as would mean that the 0â10 scale would have to span 4 orders of magnitude. While GĂłmez-Emilsson & Percy (2023) suggest the scale spans âat least two orders of magnitudeâ, private communication with the authors indicates their central estimates might be closer to 4 orders of magnitude, with uncertainty ranging from 2 to 8 OOMs.
The paper cited also mentions the possibility of a linear relationship for lower pain intensities and an exponential relationship at higher intensities (a âkinkedâ distribution), highlighting the fact that there are more possibilities beyond a uniform exponential increase.
I personally donât have a good intuition for what the base should be but might do more work on this specific question.
Iâm also not sure what the optimal mapping of intensities for the Russell vs Torelli & Manzoni scales is, also considering the fact that the two studies had different methodologies. I think thereâs no correct answer, so that was my best guess (though I could also imagine âVery slightâ being more intense than a 1.5). Do let me know if you have other suggestions! (Or feel free to fork the code and play around with the parameters. :) )
Thanks! Itâd be great if someone (maybe myself, but ideally someone with more experience in the field) published a summary of the existing literature (more research here). Having spent so many hours reading up on the topic these past few months, Iâm optimistic about the efficacy. I think funding and/âor running a large scale RCT in particular for N,N-DMT (in a country where it is legal) would be a great use of EA money/âtime.
I think the EA community has shown incredible initiative in tackling major global health issues, making a lot of progress on problems such as malaria (which causes 600,000 deaths/âyear) and lead poisoning (which causes 1.5M deaths/âyear), among so many others. These efforts really show our ability to mobilize resources and drive change when we identify pressing problems.
My hope is that we can direct a similar amount of attention to helping the ~3 million people worldwide who have this terrible condition. Even if my quantitative estimates of the burden of pain were off by an order of magnitude, the situation would still be tragic (and, as @algekalipso has pointed out, somewhat analogous to times when anesthesia had already been invented but not adopted, given the promise of low dose psychedelics1). I think it would be an incredible success story for our community if we managed to eliminate (or at least significantly reduce) this source of enormous suffering. If youâd like to contribute in any wayâeither with time or fundingâplease get in touch!
1 Coincidentally, when I asked Claude to estimate the lifetime prevalence of undergoing major surgery without general anesthesia before it was invented, its initial guess was surprisingly similar to the lifetime prevalence of cluster headachesâ0.2%.
Done! Thanks for sharing this!
I think that a corollary of the first point is that we can learn a lot about alignment by looking at humans who seem unusually aligned to human values (although I think more generally to the interests of all conscious beings), e.g. highly attained meditators with high integrity, altruistic motivations, rationality skills, and a healthy balance of sytematizer and empathizer mindsets. From phenomenological reports, their subagentic structures seem quite unlike anything most of us experience day to day. That, plus a few core philosophical assumptions, can get you a really long way in deducing e.g. Anthropicâs constitutional AI principles from first principles.
(The link isnât working for me.)
Nearly five years since this post was written, and still so little attention and virtually no funding in EA is dedicated to this problem. Ignoring the logarithmic distribution of suffering continues to be my top contender for biggest blindspot in the EA community. My heart goes out to the likely millions of people worldwide who suffer hell-level pain on a regular basis. Iâll continue to think of ways to help.
I really liked your talk! Congratulations, and I hope the idea continues to catch on!
Thanks for writing this! You might find this article interesting: The heavy-tailed valence hypothesis: the human capacity for vast variation in pleasure/âpain and how to test it (largely based on this EA Forum post: Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain: Rating, Ranking, and Comparing Peak Experiences Suggest the Existence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering).
Thanks for the feedback, Max! And also for your support in the past. Super appreciated. :)
Hi! Iâve been working full time in operations at EA orgs for 6 years (3.5 years at the Center on Long-Term Risk and 2.5 at the Legal Priorities Project). I rarely ever work past 6 pm and ~never on weekends, and have had colleagues with similar boundaries. Everyone Iâve worked with has been extremely respectful of those boundaries.
When deciding whether to take a job, I think itâs possible to tell your potential employer something like âIâm willing to work X hours per week, Iâm not willing to do Y, etc. Do you still want to hire me?â And let them decide. Similarly, I think recruiters should always share the worst parts about the job before hiring someone (more on this here). And if they donât, you can always ask.
Good luck!
And the excellent Point-by-point critique of Ordâs âWhy Iâm Not a Negative Utilitarianâ by Magnus Vinding.
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This is so amazing to read! I first met Eirik in 2015 when he was studying abroad in Munichâhe also helped get EA Munich off the ground together with me and others! He continues to be one of the nicest and kindest people I know, and his enthusiasm is contagious. Very well deserved!
I guess you mean âEAGxLatinAmericaâ instead of âEAGx Mexicoâ?
Thanks for sharing, Deborah! Iâll add these resources to my list of interventions. :)