On priors technology has not been good for animals. So weakly lean against. But could go either way.
weeatquinceđ¸
Karma: 6,340
AI writing seems to be pretty poor so far, and I keep trying to use it for things. But it recently did play a role in helping me turn my jumbled bullet points into better writing.
In principle up for some sort of cheap bet. However I have mostly stopped working on this now and handed back to Vicky for review and implementation so have very very limited time to and headspace for more work, or defining a bet or, reviewing data collection, etc. Actually mostly trying not to think about this as much as possible for the next 2 months so if there was a bet it would be saying sure I bet $100 and I trust you to work out a fair answer without needing me and let me know in 2 months.
If you did want to work with Rethink to test this:The aim should be to test the ratio 50:1 not the specific length of time (12 min). If this research was being done well there could be a case for asking about different lengths of time and seeing how that varies responses (FWIW based on Welfare Footprint the periods of times most animals spend in excruciating pain is 10-15 seconds during slaughter so that would be the most useful anchor if a time is needed).
I expect how you ask the question makes all the difference, I think phrased one way I would easily win and another I would easily loose. Similarly words like âtortureâ have more weight than words like â9.5 out of 10 on the pain scaleâ. I read one paper where they did an iterative approach with face to face interviews to get into what people think rather than trust immediate survey responses and that showed that in the face to face interviews people were more pain averse than in a quick survey but more so at all levels of pain (if anything the ratio between mild and sever was less steep). Here is a fun exercise I wrote for myself.
I think practically everyone would prefer 10 h of hurtful pain over 12 min of excruciating pain under WFIâs definitions. Do you disagree?
I disagree.
It looks like on average people would be indifferent between 10 h of hurtful pain over 12 min of excruciating pain. People are diverse and there would be very high variation and very strong views in both directions, but some people (such as a noticeable minority of women in the cited study) would prefer short sharp very painful fix over ongoing pain.
(One possible source of error here is I might have systematically miscalibrated the welfare footprint pain scale. I connected âhurtfulâ to 4.8 and âexcruciatingâ to 10 on a 0 to 10 scale. It could be good to get estimates on this from others.)
Thank you Vasco
AGREE ON THERE BEING SOME VALUE FOR MORE RESEARCH
I agree AIM 2025 SADS were below ideal robustness and as such I have spent much of the last few weeks doing additional research to improve the pain scaling estimates. If you have time and want to review this then let me know.
I would be interested in Rethink Priorities or others doing additional work on this topic.
AGREE ON THE LIMITS OF CONDENSING TO A SINGLE NUMBER
I have adapted the 2026 SAD model to give outputs at the four different pain levels, as well as a single aggregated number. This should help users of the model make their own informed decisions and not just focus on the one number.
I DISAGREE ON NOT USING THE RESEARCH WE HAVE
Where I disagree is where you say we basically have no idea how to compare different levels of pain, and your suggestion that we should not be doing so.
Every time we make a decision EG to focus on an issue of stocking densities rather than slaughter methods, we are ultimately deciding to focus on less extreme but longer lasting forms of pain. Being as explicit as we can about our numbers and our thinking helps us make those decisions better (as long as we donât overly rely on a single number).
We do have some data and we should use it to inform our decisions and our numbers. This includes academic studies of people in pain, including those with severe conditions, and self-reports from people who experienced extreme pain.
DISAGREE ON NOT BELIEVING PEOPLE
Less important but: I also disagree on your suggestion not to trust the standard academic approach of asking about /â peopleâs responses on âworse pain imaginableâ. Maybe sometimes people overestimate how bad that is sometimes underestimate it. You seem to be claiming these women (or the whole public) are en mass systematically underestimating. That is a strong claim and not one I would put much weight on without good evidence.
Yes that are (often known) systematic over and underestimation effects. This can be addressed by asking similar questions in different ways that aim to elicit different biases, or by having a back and forth between questioner and respondent to seek consistency.
If research does not match our intuitions we need to be objective in judging the value of that research and not claim systematic bias without evidence.
Hi Vasco. Firstly, it should be noted that the overall ratio used for the 2025 SADs was 1000x not 7x. The updated 2026 ratio based on more extensive research is 50x.
Secondly on âI do not see how one would be indifferent between theseâ. You might be surprised if it does not match your personal experience, but many people are indifferent between relatively extreme levels of pain, including people who have been through quite extreme pain. Just as an example this study on 37 women who have just gone through labour, roughly one third of them would prefer a 9â10 pain for 2 hours than a 1â10 pain for 18 hours!
Finally, I defend putting at least some weight on counter-intuitive results of academic research. I especially defend this in the case where you are analysing and pooling the results of many papers and expect some results to be bias upwards and some results to be bias downwards. The new SAD spreadsheet links to 15 different studies /â pieces of evidence on this topic. Of those 15 some of which show counterintuitively low and some counterintuitively high relative preferences for different levels of pain. I think it is better to put weight on all of them based on the quality of the evidence they present not be (overly) guided by an intuitive sense of the results we want to find.
Thank you done.
APPG for FuÂture GenÂerÂaÂtions past imÂpact reÂview and perÂsonal retrospective
UK political animal welfare work
I believe it is a relatively common beekeeping practice to clip a wing of the queen bee to prevent the colony leaving
Bioweapons are an existential risk.
With current technology probably not an x-risk. With future technology I donât think we can rule out the possibility of bio-sciences reaching the point where extinction is possible. It is a very rapidly evolving field with huge potential.
I think people working on animal welfare have more incentives to post during debate week than people working on global health.
The animal space feels (when you are in it) very funding constrained, especially compared to working in the global health and development space (and I expect gets a higher % of funding from EA /â EA-adjacent sources). So along comes debate week and all the animal folk are very motivated to post and make their case and hopefully shift a few $. This could somewhat bias the balance of the debate. (Of course the fact that one side of the debate feels they needs funding so much more is in itself relevant to the debate.)
weeatquinceâs Quick takes
Hi there, I was wondering what you mean by âreal estate speculationâ: what the issue is and in what ways it is tractable? Thank you for any insights you can give, hoping to do some research into housing issues in LMICs :-)
No this seems more than just semantic. It does seem like Iâve underestimated the ability to influence B2B companies. I stand corrected. Thank you.
Thank you for considering my comments
To be clear I would consider the target of the campaign in those cases to be on the hospital or the university and those to be B2C organizations in some meaningful way.
Additionally if you want to show that you can credibly engage policymakers (which I think you might need to do in order to put pressure on these companies) I would expect transparency of people and funding sources to help a lot.
What are the key leverage points to get these companies to listen to campaigners such as yourself? How does this differ from the animal right space and how will this affect your strategy? What do you have in terms of strategy documents or theory of change?
Some thoughts on my mind are:
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To the best of my understanding the animal rights corporate campaigning space is unable to exert much or any influence on B2B (business to business) companies. Animal campaigns only appear to have influenced B2C (business to consumer) companies. An autonomous coding agent feels more B2B and by analogy having any influence here could be extremely difficult. That said I donât think this should be a huge problem as...
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The leverage points for influencing companies in the AI space is very different to the animal space. In particular AI companies are probably much more concerned about losing employees to other companies than food companies. I expect they are also likely concerned about regulation that could restrict their actions. I expect there much less concerned about public image. As such..
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This does suggest to somewhat different approach to corporate campaign. Potentially targeting employees more (although probably not picking on individuals) and greater focus on presenting the targeted company negatively to regulators/âpolicymakers or to investors, more than to the public.
This is just quick thoughts and I might be wrong about much of this. I just wanted to flag as your post seemed to suggest that this work would be similar to work in the animal space and in many ways it is but I think thereâs a risk of not seeing the differences. I wish you all the best of luck with your campaigning.
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Hi, Thank you. All good points. Fully agree with ongoing iterative improvement to our CEAs and hopefully you will see such improvements happening over the various research rounds (see also my reply to Nick). I also agree with picking up on specific cases where this might be a bigger issue (see my reply to Larks). I donât think it is fair to say that we treat those two numbers as zero but it is fair to say we are currently using a fairly crude approximation to get at what those numbers are getting it in our lives saved calculations.
For a source on discounting see here: https://âârethinkpriorities.org/ââpublications/ââa-review-of-givewells-discount-rate#we-recommend-that-givewell-continue-discounting-health-at-a-lower-rate-than-consumption-but-we-are-uncertain-about-the-precise-discount-rate
âDiscounting consumption vs. health benefits | Discount health benefits using only the temporal uncertainty componentâ
I think there is a very strong case to be made for a GHD effective altruism fund that does not just follow GiveWell:
1. For NGOs/âprojects: If I want to get funding for an animals /â meta /â longtermism project I apply to the EA Funds. There is no equivalent place to seek funding in EA for GHD. This is a clear gap that the EA Funds could fill.
2. Cost-effectiveness: there is a trade-off between cost-effectiveness and scale, see here (from here). GiveWell move enough funds so that they often donât look at the more low-scale high-cost-effective donation opportunities. Thereâs a clear space for the EA Funds to fill. Many smaller orgs in EA may struggle to reach the scale that means GiveWell will consider evaluating them but still be worth funding.
3. Variety and openness in causes: AIM (Charity Entrepreneurship) found lots of ways to do good in GHD that are not clearly measured in DALYs and often not covered by GiveWell, from health system strengthening, to education, to preventing violence against women, to policy advocacy.
4. For donors: If I just wanted to give to GiveWell, I would give to GiveWell. What I want from the EA Funds is something different â that supports new or smaller projects in the EA GHD community.
Good luck for the hire for the EAIF. Would be excited to see the GHD Fund get attention at some point too.