RobertDaoust
Great post, Alfredo. I added a reference to it in my Preparatory Notes for the Measurement of Suffering.
You say “Given the near-universal agreement across ethical traditions regarding the importance of prioritizing those who suffer most, it is surprising how little effort goes into understanding and addressing extreme suffering. Even in communities where triaging is common sense (such as the effective altruism community or even the medical community at large), actual investment into reducing extreme suffering is minuscule, especially relative to its importance.”
I will just answer that with this Call for Collaboration to Systematically Address the Problem of Suffering in the World.
Thank you and congrats for this post which suggests great possibilities for advancement in the field of genomics.
Speaking of “Building partnerships with political and advocacy groups with shared or overlapping objectives”, there is a crucial support opportunity that I must mention.
The post states “A sustainable long-term framework for safeguarding future wellbeing and systematically reducing preventable suffering should integrate ethically governed genomic care with comprehensive socio-environmental interventions.” Such a long-term framework does not yet exist, as far as I know, but I propose a plan that would hugely boost human activities aimed at alleviating suffering, including genomic care and socio-environmental interventions. This plan involves the mutual interaction of three key building blocks: 1) a World Center for the Control of Excessive Suffering, 2) an AI app for Dealing With Questions About Suffering, and 3) an Algoscience for the Systematic Study of Suffering. See more details in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q25r3JYc4c97LE1ObLI5OtZcrN0QEMj0voxZvG-2QzE/edit?usp=sharing.
Let’s hope we can all make rapid progress.
Thanks again, Wladimir.
What you do about animal suffering is already taken into account in our efforts concerning quantification at the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering, and I hope that more of it will soon figure in the chapter Suffering-Focused Animal-Centered Initiatives within the World Center for the Control of Excessive Suffering. Incidentally, I recently came across https://www.ixo.world/ and I wonder if this impact-focused organization could be relevant when you say “the Welfare Footprint Framework has been applied to quantify welfare impacts in animal production systems, guiding policy decisions and reforms.”
As to Creating an AI App to Answer Questions About Suffering, I ask everyone to let me know if, by chance, anyone around them might be interested in contributing to the very early stages of this project.
I wish I had time to discuss definitions of pain and suffering, but it seems that all I can say for now is that all those who want to study pain or suffering scientifically should collectively adopt a new technical term for referring to all unpleasant feelings.
Best regards.
Thank you Wladimir, I just saw your comment—for some reason, I don’t get notification from EAF.
I listed the Welfare Footprint Project some time ago in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OTCQlWE-GkY_V4V-OfJAr7Q-vJyIR8ZATpeMrLkmlAo/edit?usp=sharing
Your work is amazing! I hope our efforts meet someday. Beyond the WF Framework, I am especially interested in the Pain Atlas Project and the Neurophilosopher GPT Tool. I would like also to discuss your definitions concerning pain and suffering. And, of course, I wholeheartedly share your vision, when you say: “Ultimately, we would like to help transform the understanding of animal and human suffering, shifting it from an abstract concept to a scientifically measurable and extensively mapped phenomenon across all sentient beings.”
My current work is to develop a means of establishing more fruitful relationships between all our various specialties that deal with suffering. My latest idea is expressed in a question I posted two days ago on the Forum: “What About Creating an App That Would Answer Any Question Related to Suffering?” https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z5KgLod4hin9TDtWQ/what-about-creating-an-app-that-would-answer-any-question
Let’s keep up the good work!
One question that a Universal Application Dealing With Suffering might suggest to a user: “How can I make good use of my suffering to help solve my own suffering and that of others?”.
Thank you for asking the question. I’m not competent enough to answer with confidence, but here’s how I see things.
Questions we may ask about suffering are countless. A static website could deal with only a tiny fraction of them. I imagine a dynamic website could amount to an app, but don’t we use Google Maps a lot more as an app than the website at https://www.google.com/maps/? As for the LLM, it would be an indispensable part of the envisaged application, but I imagine that the latter would specify the domain of research or discussion and allow the whole subject of suffering to be specifically organized in a more general, complete, and logical way, which would add much to the usefulness of the query for users.
What I have in mind is access, for the first time in history, to a comprehensive body of knowledge on suffering. I hope that an application such as the one proposed could become so popular, both with ordinary people and specialists in various fields of work, that it would help fund a center for the systematic study and control of excessive suffering in the world.
How interesting! Some may deplore the use of AI to re-present a recently published text. I suspect, however, that there is a deeper reason: the very idea of a World Center on suffering is so path-breaking that it cannot avoid attracting unjustified negative reactions.
Thanks for your comment.
The economy is certainly one of the key areas of our societies where much of the risk of suffering and crime is played out. Disparity might not be a problem in itself, but when people are denied the essentials to survive decently, it is clear that the resulting suffering may be a cause of systematic crime. How exactly? I suppose economists have looked at this question over the last two or three centuries, but… while many professionals in various fields (healthcare, economics, ethics, law, etc. ) are motivated by the alleviation of suffering at the start of their career, none so far have been able to keep the phenomenon of suffering at the forefront of their concerns, because their profession necessarily deals first and foremost with its own specific object (health/illness, wealth/poverty, the good/the bad, the right/crime, etc. ) rather than with suffering as such: a specifically dedicated discipline would be a game-changer.
Young Effective Altruists would do well to consider a career in this new discipline, which awaits its illustrious pioneers.
Yes I know, thank you ADS, but I rather have in mind something like “Toward an Institute for the Science of Suffering” https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cyDnDBxQKarKjeug2YJTv7XNTlVY-v9sQL45-Q2BFac/edit#
An institute for the science of suffering.
Your concern about doomsday projects is very welcome in this age of high existential risks. Suffering in particular plays a central role in that game. Religious fanatics, for instance, are waiting for the cessation of suffering through some kind of apocalypse. Many negative utilitarians or antinatalists, on another side, would like us to organize the end of the world in the coming years, a prospect that can only lead to absurd results. For the short term, doomsday end suffering projects can plan to eliminate life (or at least human life, because bacteria and other small creatures would be extremely hard to eliminate on this planet), but I doubt that they would want to have consideration for “the conditions for the evolution of life throughout the universe”, be it only because they are completely unable to do anything about that, or because they are anyway not rational at all in their endeavor. So, there is a race between us and the doomsday mongers: I think that bringing a solution to suffering is our only chance to win in time.
The solution to the problem of suffering cannot be to eliminate all life because lifeless evolution created life once and it could recreate it, and million years of pain would come along again before another intelligent species like ours re-appear with technical power and has a chance to resolve the problem of suffering by controlling that phenomenon through conscious rational efforts until the end of this universe.
“I’m not sure what I should do with this information. There is no cosmic justice in suffering on behalf of others, in living burdened by its unthinkable urgency. Yet there is something like cosmic justice in acting to reduce the worst suffering in our world. I do not even know where to start.”
We are numerous, since millennia, who want to do something about suffering. Why not work together in an enterprise for an optimal alleviation of suffering in the world? That is what the Algosphere Alliance is proposing: to organize the alleviation of suffering, steadily and sustainably.More directly addressing the point of your text, Aaron, I suggest that we use our thinking power to abstractly think the urgency of suffering so that as a consequence we can act theoretically within the framework of a science of suffering (algonomy) and practically within the framework of a concrete all-encompassing organization (algonomic alliance).
Congrats on your approach, Sanjay and Meg. The Algosphere Alliance is inviting people who are interested in the organized alleviation of suffering in the world to be “Partner in the business world” as you can see in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J9wOcCERPiegaPzfbDLfcjoH45GAgCPp2HeGE1s-5To/edit. That’s a beginning.
Yes, Ramiro, you may write to me at daoust514@gmail.com and I will transmit your demand to them.
I am all in favor of chronic pain being a cause area. In itself, that would be a good thing, but there is another, more important reason: this might help us to realize how exactly physical pain and most concerns in EA are related to the arch-cause of suffering. The very notion of EFFECTIVENESS is at stake in this matter. In my opinion, the whole field of pain research and management has not decisively advanced since the 1970s, when I first became interested in it. I believe progress is hindered by a fundamental problem in pain theory, as explained in https://www.academia.edu/7443845/The_Study_and_Management_of_Pain_Require_a_New_Discipline_about_Suffering. For those who’d like a TL;DR summary: simply starting a science of suffering should urgently be made a cause area.
How must we get systematically organized to alleviate suffering in the world?
Our knowledge about future is so weak.