Thanks for sharing this Alfredo, I hadn’t really thought about trying to map subjective pain scales to a pain magnitude, but it seems very important to be able to do so! If using an exponential scale, what is your intuitive sense of what ranges of base to use seem reasonable? If you’re modeling magnitude as base^(1-10 pain scale value), the relative importance of extreme pain is pretty sensitive to the base used. I see e is used as the default in the paper, but I assume that’s partly arbitrary. A value more like 2 seems most reasonable to me, but that is a weakly held view. Has any other work tried to look at suffering magnitude across the pain scale?
I wish we could have more confidence in the pain intensity data. I’m not sure how exactly we should compare the 5-point scale in Russell to the 10-point one in Torelli & Manzoni, in the mapping you’ve done in the code to a shared 10-point scale, they suggest very different intensities.
Tim Duffy
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Thanks, that’s helpful! I think that footnote may have an error though. 6^10 is 60 million, implying nearly 8 OOMs from 0 to 10. The 1-10 gap would be closer to 4 OOMs if linear from 0-5 and exponential with base 6 from 0-10 though. 2-8 OOMs seems like a reasonable range to me, it’s comically broad but highlights our uncertainty about pain magnitude. I’ll definitely give Gómez-Emilsson & Percy (2023) a read, and will fork your cose and play around with the numbers as well!