Thanks, Itamar. I’m glad you found the framework useful, and thanks for laying out these concerns.
(1) On selection in life-or-death situations. I’m less convinced that life-or-death contexts should be treated as marginal for evolutionary explanation. Many such hazards (e.g. fire, severe injury, predation) recur across generations, and even small increases in the probability of rapid withdrawal and survival can be strongly selected for. In that sense, excruciating pain in these contexts looks like a straightforward case of ordinary evolutionary logic at work... (read more)
I think practically everyone would prefer 10 h of hurtful pain over 12 min of excruciating pain under WFI's 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 syste... (read more)
Outside view: If I got WID data right: net personal wealth of US top percentile increased from $.59 Million in 1820 to $13.53 Million in 2024. For the bottom two deciles of India it increased from $58 to $228.
The industrial revolution made some people very rich, but not others. Why would transformative AI make everybody incredibly rich? See also https://intelligence-curse.ai/
I used: Average net personal wealth, all ages, equal split, Dollar $ ppp constant (2024) (I'm new to WID database and did not have time to read the data documentation. Let me know if I interpret data wongly.) Source: https://wid.world/
I've just noticed that the OBBB Act contains a "no tax on overtime" provision, exempting extra overtime pay up to a deduction of $12,500, for tax years 2025-2028. If you, like me, are indifferent between 40-hour workweeks and alternating 32- and 48-hour workweeks, you can get a pretty good extra tax deduction. This can be as easy as working one weekend day every 2 weeks and taking a 3-day weekend the following week. (That's an upper bound on the difficulty! Depending on your schedule and preferences there are probably even easier ways.) Unfortunately this only works for hourly, not salaried, employees.
It would probably be worthwhile to encourage legally binding versions of the Giving Pledge in general.
Donations before death are optimal, but it's particularly easy to ensure that the pledge is met at that stage with a will which can be updated at the time of signing it. (I presume most of the 64% did have a will, but chose to leave their fortune to others. I guess it's possible some fortunes inherited by widow[er]s will be donated to pledged causes in the fullness of time).
I don't think this should replace the Giving Pledge; some people's inte... (read more)
I like Scott's Mistake Theory vs Conflict Theory framing, but I don't think this is a complete model of disagreements about policy, nor do I think the complete models of disagreement will look like more advanced versions of Mistake Theory + Conflict Theory.
To recap, here's my short summaries of the two theories:
Mistake Theory: I disagree with you because one or both of us are wrong about what we want, or how to achieve what we want)
Conflict Theory: I disagree with you because ultimately I want different things from you. The Marxists, who Scott was or... (read more)
Wow, I've never seen that print before. That is absolutely horrifying. I feel kind of sick looking at it. What a stark reminder of the costs of getting morality wrong. Thank you for painting it, for sharing it, and for the reminder of this day.
The updated 2026 ratio based on more extensive research is 50x.
This implies 10 h of "awareness of Pain is likely to be present most of the time" (hurtful pain) is as bad as 12 min (= 10/50*60) of "severe burning in large areas of the body, dismemberment, or extreme torture" (excruciating pain). In contrast, I think practically everyone would prefer 10 h of hurtful pain over 12 min of excruciating pain under WFI's definitions. Do you disagree?
I have adapted the 2026 SAD model to give outputs at the four different pain levels, as well as a single aggreg
I didn't end up writing a reflection in the comments as I'd meant to when I posted this, but I did end up making two small paintings inspired by Benjamin Lay & his work. I've now shared them here.
Around the same time I also made two paintings inspired by his life/work, which I figured I'd share now. One is an icon-style-inspired image based on a portrait of him[1]:
The second is based on a print depicting the floor plan of an infamous slave ship (Brooks). The print was used by abolitionists (mainly(?) the Society for Effec... (read more)
Was there a specific claim or section that didn’t land for you? I found the ideas interesting and consistent with the author’s prior work on these topics. Any thoughts on the substance?
Thanks for flagging this, Ozzie. I led the GCR Cause Prio team for the last year before it was wound down, so I can add some context.
The honest summary is that the team never really achieved product-market fit. Despite the name, we weren't really doing “cause prioritization” as most people would conceive of it. GCR program teams have wide remits within their areas and more domain expertise and networks than we had, so the separate cause prio team model didn't work as well as it does for GHW, where it’s more fruitful to dig into new literatures and build qu... (read more)
Per your foundations vs grantees point, I just saw that the Bezos Family Foundation is looking for a new president, with a salary of $500K to $700K. BFF's work seems pretty straightforward -- giving away $150 million a year (wealth Jeff's parents got from Amazon). That salary is higher than that of the typical president of a $150 million a year nonprofit with actual operations.
I agree that in genuinely catastrophic situations, evolution should tolerate very “loud” alarms. The open question, though, is whether those alarms need to be implemented as extreme affective states, rather than through non-affective or lower-intensity control mechanisms.
I was assuming they do not need to be, but might appear and remain anyway if they have no significant downside, like, e.g., humans' protruding chins. How loud the alarm is beyond the "loud enough" point would then just be a matter of luck.[1] Both just-loud-enough alarms and unnecessa... (read more)
Ah yes, this supports my pre-conceived belief that (1) we cannot reliably ascertain whether a model has catastrophically dangerous capabilities, and therefore (2) we need to stop developing increasingly powerful models until we get a handle on things.
socialism fundamentally confuses efficiency and equity: the two opposite sides of the economic policy coin.
utility is roughly log(wealth), so we maximize utility by maximizing the size of the pie, and also how evenly it's distributed. some redistributive mechanisms shrink the pie — they have what economists refer to as "deadweight loss". e.g. if i have an apple and you have an orange, but i think an orange is worth two apples and you think an apple is worth two oranges, then we double our utility by trading. that is a pareto improvement. but if a tax is im... (read more)
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 num... (read more)
Nicely balanced, well-structured, and link-heavy, as such a post "should" be: well-done![1] I'm very unlikely to act in this area, but as it's less mapped-out than some larger areas, I find this helpful, insofar as most intros to the area are theoretical and not focused on prioritizing potential interventions.
Nicely balanced, well-structured, and link-heavy, as such a post "should" be: well-done![1] I'm very unlikely to act in this area, but as it's less mapped-out than some larger areas, I find this helpful, insofar as most intros to the area are theoretical and not focused on prioritizing potential interventions.
I've been thinking about this in vague terms for a while (and have used the analogy a few times in conversations), but it was an entirely different experience to read it an properly written way, with many details I hadn't considered.
Best intuition-pumping exercise I've seen in a while!
I'm a meat eater but haven't yet donated to animal causes. So I believe I am the target of the campaign.
I'm not offended by their approach. I recognize that stirring up controversy is a reality of the media game. I think it's good that they through the stepping stones to achieving virality.
Yes, they are hiding the fact that they actually endorse veganism. I wouldn't call it "manipulative". They are appealing to my values. I'd call that good salesmanship. If they find my diet morally abhorrent, I'm not upset at them for neglecting to menti... (read more)
Thank you for this thoughtful reply, this comment is basically the reason this update exists. You were right that Hamilton is probably right.
I have written a longer update incorporating Hamilton's reanalysis and extending the economics in two directions: a quantitative treatment of verification as the binding constraint, and a systematic look at the economic conditions under which a genuinely dangerous autonomous agent actually gets to run.
Curious whether you think the analysis holds up, and whether there are important considerations I have missed!
"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" Thanks for such comprehensive statistical analyses that have enlightened me on how AI firms have sometimes been misleading. It inspires me to try building my own predictive models again. It seems governments would do well to remember another proverb: "The best way to predict the future is to create it" - an interesting [Deloitte analysis](https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/government-public-sector-services/ai-regulations-around-the-world.html) highlighted government's power as a buyer and not only a regulator.
Thank you for reading my post and for the thoughtful comment — and for the links to the Sentience Institute methodology, which I found genuinely interesting.
The goal of my post was to draw lessons for the EA community from the Fabians' approach, not to provide a rigorous causal analysis of their impact — which would require considerably more space and evidence than a forum post allows. That said, I do think however the evidence for Fabian influence goes well beyond the two points you mentioned. The historical literature — Margaret Cole's The Story of Fabia... (read more)
Potential Animal Welfare intervention: encourage the ASPCA and others to scale up their FAW budget
I’ve only recently come to appreciate how large the budgets are for the ASPCA, Humane World (formerly HSUS), and similar large, broad-based animal charities. At a quick (LLM) scan of their public filings, they appear to have a combined annual budget of ~$1Bn, most of which is focused on companion animals.
Interestingly, both the ASPCA and Humane World explicitly mention factory farming as one of their areas of concern. Yet, based on available data, it looks lik... (read more)
Hi Joel - in this case the positive sentiment towards mental health is indeed probably driven quite a bit by domestic mental health concerns. We actually provide an example or two for each cause and the mental health one notes improving or increasing access to mental health in the U.S.. Given it is the only mental health thing we have done so far in Pulse I think it would be hard to tease out with current data as you suggest.
But yes there could be opportunities to add something in upcoming rounds - feel free to DM or reach out by email to discuss mor... (read more)
Firstly, it should be noted that the overall ratio used for the 2025 SADs was 1000x not 7x.
Right. There was a weight of 45 % on a ratio of 7.06, and of 55 % on one of 62.8 k (= 3.44*10^6/54.8), 8.90 k (= 62.8*10^3/7.06) times as much. My explanation for the large difference is that very little can be inferred about the intensity of excruciating pain, as defined by the Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI), from the academic studies AIM analysed to derive the pain intensities linked to the lower ratio.
Thanks, Wladimir. That makes sense. I look forward to your future work on this. Let me know if funding ever becomes bottleneck, in which case I may want to help with a few k$.
Excellent post - I enjoyed reading it, and find the mental framework useful!
Two comments:
In evolutionary analysis, there are challenges with properties that are mainly relevant in life-or-death situations. Many of the organisms faced with such circumstances will not survive the immediate situation, and of those left, many will not reproduce. This slows down or completely stops development of certain properties. For example, there are well-suntantiated claims for the deterioration of our immune system at old age due to this - we are no longer reproductively
This is beautiful, thank you! This has definitely planted some seeds in my mind. Perhaps the most interesting points to me have been the prevalence of cockfighting and the dominance of ethics centered around virtues
Let be the number of parameters in the model, be the number of data tokens it is trained on, be the number of times the model is deployed (e.g. the number of questions it is asked) and be the number of inference steps each time it is deployed (e.g. the number of tokens per answer). Then this approximately works out to:[9]
Note that scaling up the number of parameters, , increases both pre-training compute and inference compute, because you need to use those parameters each time you run a forward pass in your model.
Browser extensions are almost[1] never widely adopted.
Whenever anyone reminds me of this by proposing the annotations everywhere concept again, I remember that the root of the problem is distribution. You can propose it, you can even build it, but it wont be delivered to people. It should be. There are ways of designing computers/a better web where rollout would just happen.
That's what I want to build.
Software mostly isn't extensible, or where it is, it's not extensible enough (even web browsers aren't as extensible as they need to be! Chrome have sta... (read more)
While EA is not fully at the table yet, EcoResilience Initiative is an EA group trying to answer exactly those questions:
"What are the problems we're trying to solve?" "What are the most neglected aspects of those problems?" and "What is the most cost-effective way to address those neglected areas?"
Thanks for the post! It seems like CEA and EA Funds are the only entities left housed under EV (per the EV website); if that's the case, why bother spinning out at all?
I don't mean to sound too negative on this - I did just say "a bit sad" on that one specific point.
Do I think that CE is doing worse or better overall? It seems like Coefficient has been making a bunch of changes, and I don't feel like I have a good handle on the details. They've also been expanding a fair bit. I'd naively assume that a huge amount of work is going on behind the scenes to hire and grow, and that this is putting CE in a better place on average.
I would expect this (the GCR prio team change) to be some evidence that specific ambitious approac... (read more)
Really cool work. It's striking how much higher mental health is in importance and support than GHD. Do you have any insight into why this is and what people are imagining when they're referring to mental health?
I interpret this as very weak evidence that there's an audience for global mental health / mental health related EG that is non-overlapping with GHD (that is, there are MH givers that wouldn't otherwise give to GHD). But of course 1. most philanthropy is domestically oriented, and presumably that's what people mostly ... (read more)
You’re absolutely right to push us toward the practical question of how to compare affective capacity across species. That’s ultimately where this line of work needs to go. At the same time, we’ve been deliberately cautious here, because we think this is one of those cases where moving too quickly to numbers or rankings risks making the waters muddier rather than clearer.
Our sense is that the comparison of affective capacity across species hinges on a set of upstream scientific questions that are still poorly... (read more)
Thanks a lot for the kind words, Jim — and for the thoughtful pushback.
I think your point holds if we assume that the only way to implement a very strong alarm is via extreme felt intensity — but that assumption is exactly what we’re questioning.
I agree that in genuinely catastrophic situations, evolution should tolerate very “loud” alarms. The open question, though, is whether those alarms need to be implemented as extreme affective states, rather than through non-affective or lower-intensity control mechanisms.
On the benefit side, there seem to be two di... (read more)
The critical question is whether shrimp or insects can support the kinds of negative states that make suffering severe, rather than merely possible.
I think suffering matters proportionally to its intensity. So I would not neglect mild suffering in principle, although it may not matter much in practice due to contributing little to total expected suffering.
In any case, I would agree the total expected welfare of farmed invertebrates may be tiny compared with that of humans due invertebrates' experiences having a very low intensity. For expected individual w... (read more)
Short version, very little in that paper has stood the test of time and the particular passage you quote has many problems. I’d encourage you to reconsider including it!
Hi Rob. A few more thoughts. I grant you that the evidence for sentie... (read more)
I've been trying to keep the "meta" and the main posts mostly separate so hopefully the discussions for the metas and the main posts aren't as close together.
And even granting the usual EA filters—tractability, neglectedness, feasibility, and evidential robustness—the scale gradient from shrimp to insects (via agriculture-related deaths) is so steep that these filters don’t, by themselves, explain why the precautionary logic should settle on shrimp. All else equal, once you shift to a target that is thousands of times larger, an intervention could be far less effective [in terms of robustly increasing welfare in expectation] and still compete on expected impact.
I very much agree. Moreover, I do not even know wh... (read more)
Hi Oli, I appreciate your thoughtful reply and share much of your sentiment. Indeed, we must protect the flame. The inner fire I have for positive impact (especially animal welfare) is equally critical, but I find it's sometimes hard to give both the attention they need. Personally, I think it would improve my art to attend to both simultaneously, but probably not improve my impact (unless I come up with some better ideas).
Personally I don't think Sam Altman is motivated by money. He just wants to be the one to build it.
I sense that Elon Musk and Dorio Amodei's motivations are more complex than "motivated by money", but I can imagine that the actual dollar amounts are more important to them than to Sma.
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 "I do not see how one would be indifferent between these". 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 9/10... (read more)
TBH my sense is that GiveWell is just being polite.
A perhaps more realistic motivation is that admitting animal suffering into GiveWell's models would implicitly force them to specify moral weights for animals (versus humans), and there is no way to do that without inviting huge controversy leaving at least some groups very upset. Much easier to say "sorry, not our wheelhouse" and effectively set animal weights to zero.
That's an interesting way to connect these. I suppose one way to view your model is as making clear the point that you can't cost-effectively use models on tasks that much longer than their 50% horizons — even if you are willing to try multiple times — and that trend of dramatic price improvements over time isn't enough to help with this. Instead you need the continuation of the METR trend of exponentially growing horizons. Moreover, you give a nice intuitive explanation of why that is.
One thing to watch out for is Gus Hamilton's recent study suggesti... (read more)
Should GiveWell offer Animal Welfare regrants on an opt-in basis?
The GiveWell FAQ (quoted below) suggests that GiveWell focuses exclusively on human-directed interventions primarily for reasons of specialization—i.e., avoiding duplication of work already done by Coefficient Giving and others—rather than due to a principled objection to recommending animal-focused charities. If GiveWell is willing to recommend these organizations when asked, why not reduce the friction a bit?
A major part of GiveWell’s appeal has been its role as an “index fund for charities... (read more)
I bet there's not enough data on METR about how messy are the tasks to include it here, but I would expect it to have real world consequences and to tug in the direction of agents being less viable outside of well defined domains.
Hi! I made a BOTEC model on AI agents economic feasibility in the near term. You can find it here. It combines the half-life analysis of agent reliability with real inference costs. The core idea is that if agent cost per successful outcome scales exponentially with task length, and human cost scales linearly, it creates a sharp viability boundary that cost reductions alone cannot meaningfully shift. The only parameter that matters much is the agent's half-life (reliability horizon), which is precisely the thing that requires the continual learning breakthr... (read more)
I really appreciate how this piece treats Operations, not as a nice-to-have, but as a bottleneck that can quietly cap an organization's impact. It reminded me of Goldratt’s The Goal: if you don’t explicitly identify and elevate your constraint, the whole system stalls. The rubric feels like a practical diagnostic tool which we can use, reflect and equip ops capacity, A+ orgs are the ones that treat ops capacity, specialist support, and process design as the constraint to manage!
Are you thinking about humans as an aligned collective in the 1st paragraph of your comment? I agree all humans coordinating their actions together would have more power than other groups of organisms with their actual levels of coordination. However, such level of coordination among humans is not realistic. All 10^30 bacteria (see Table S1 of Bar-On et al. (2018)) coordinating their actions together would arguably also have more power than all humans with their actual level of coordination.
I agree it is good that no human has power over all humans. H... (read more)
Deeply appreciate this Kristof. Interesting that at a broad level (what are the best charities, how to help more people), it cites credible and evidence-based resources.
Then when discussing animals and Africa - i.e. more long-tail keywords - it does not.
There is probably low-hanging opportunity here for charities to write up more indexable FAQs and blogposts that match the language a user would use when asking an LLM a question (or even Google).
""[...] not getting a reward may create frustration, which is nothing but another form of pain." From my human experience, I can be living "net positive" while being extremely frustrated about something.
In general I think direct observation of individuals is a fantastic way forward. Maybe even the only way forward here. Theoretical arguments make so many assumptions I fee llike I could argue all sides here.
I'm amazed EAs haven't funded some individual animal observation stuff. Put a small cam and a fitbit on a deer or other prey animal and see what they get up to? My guess is that the life would look more positive than we expect.
Cracking work! Love the initiative of you extending this. Interesting to hear that Claude is EA-pilled, but that its animal welfare opinions are still more vibes-based than taking the same, rigourous stance
I'm going to guess the total donated will be 30% of this by EA funders, and a low percentage by the rest. I think your conservative number is WAY too low based on previous pledge fulfillment rates. I get that it's just a claude generation though
But that's still 2 billion dollars at least, so I've updated positively on the amount of money that might go to good causes. Thanks for this @Ozzie Gooen strong upvote.
By power I mean: ability to change the world, according to one's preferences. Humans clearly dominate today in terms of this kind of power. Our power is limited, but it is not the case that other organisms have power over us, because while we might rely on them, they are not able to leverage that dependency. Rather, we use them as much as we can.
No human is currently so powerful as to have power over all other humans, and I think that's definitely a good thing. But it doesn't seem like it would take much more advantage to let one intelligent being dominate all others.
Hi Guy. Elon Musk was not the only person responsible for the recent large cuts in foreign aid from the United States (US). In addition, I believe outcomes like human extinction are way less likely. I agree it makes sense to worry about concentration of power, but not about extreme outcomes like human extinction.
Elon Musk has already used this power to do actions which will potentially kill millions (by funding the Trump campaign enough to get to close down USAID). I think that should worry us, and the chance of people amassing even more power should worry us even more.
Mental health support for those working on AI risks and policy?
During the numerous projects I work on relating to AI risks, policies, and future threats/scenarios, I speak to a lot of people who bring exposed to issues of catastrophic and existential nature for the first time (or grappling with them for the first time in detail). This combined with the likelihood that things will get worse before they better, makes me frequently wonder: are we doing enough around mental health support?
Things that I don’t know exist but feel they should. Some may sound OTT ... (read more)
Gracias, David! We've had a busy last few months, focused on sharpening our strategic focus, devising a brand, commissioning and performing high-impact research, building relationships across the Americas - including with leading screwworm scientists - and onboarding our new Executive Director and core team. You can support our efforts right now by boosting this call, including on LinkedIn, or by sharing our Every.org donation page with people in your network who might be interested in learning more, or supporting us with resources. Thank you again!
I think you’re right that they’ve not accounted for this. Their current calculation assumes a baseline new donation rate of zero, which seems very unlikely. If the question is how much additional giving did this campaign generate, then credible attribution requires at least an estimate of the counterfactual, which here could be approximated using pre-period donations. This would be more defensible than just counting post-campaign donations.
Very interesting critique. I've seen this kinds of comments in academic circles doing evals work, and there have been attempts to improve the situation such as the General Scales Framework:
Think of it as passing an IQ test instead of a school exam, more predictive power. It's not percect ofc but thankfully some people are really taking this seriously.
I agree the thread direction may be unhelpful, and flame wars are bad.
I disagree though about the merits of questioning motivations, I think its super important.
In the AI sphere, there are great theoretical arguments on all sides, good arguments for accelleration, caution, pausing etc. We can discuss these ad nauseum and I do think that's useful. But I think motivations likely shape the history and current state of AI development more than unmotivated easoning and rational thought. Money and Power are strong motivators - EA's have sidelined them at t... (read more)
Do you think this is evidence that OpenPhil's GCR staff/team is doing less cause prioritization now than they were before? The specific things you say don't seem to be much evidence either way about this (and also not much evidence about whether or not they actually need to be doing more cause prioritization on the margin). Maybe you have further reason to believe this is bad?
I imagine there must have been a bunch of other major changes around Coefficient that aren't yet well understood externally. This caught me a bit off guard.
What makes you expect this and why (assuming you do) do you expect these changes to be negative?
It is popular to hate on Swapcard, and yet Swapcard seems like the best available solution despite its flaws. Claude Code or other AI coding assistants are very good nowadays, and conceivably, someone could just Claude Code a better Swapcard that maintained feature parity while not having flaws.
Overall I'm guessing this would be too hard right now, but we do live in an age of mysteries and wonders. It gets easier every month. One reason for optimism is it seems like the Swapcard team is probably not focused on the somewhat odd use case of EAGs in general (... (read more)
Great post, I have heard the same observations before (I live in Brussels). The examples you give are spot on. It is very very difficult to change EU policy on a political level, but I have heard of people working in the commission for less than 4 years being responsible for determining how to distribute millions of euros of developmental aid. Just having a person who asks "can I see the evidence behind the different interventions?" would make a massive difference.
In this context, I sometimes one if the single biggest opportunity is not to turn many more E... (read more)
This thread seems to have gone in an unhelpful direction.
Questioning motivations is a hard point to make well. I'm unwilling to endorse that they are never relevant, but it immediately becomes personal. Keeping the focus primarily on the level of the arguments themselves is an approach more likely to enlighten and less likely to lead to flamewars.
I'm not here to issue a moderation warning to anyone for the conversation ending up on the point of motivations. I do want to take my moderation hat off and suggest that people spend more time on the object level.... (read more)
I've been experimenting recently with a longtermist wiki, written fully with LLMs.
Some key decisions/properties: 1. Fully LLM-generated, heavily relying on Claude Code. 2. Somewhat opinionated. Tries to represent something of a median longtermist/EA longview, with a focus on the implications of AI. All pages are rated for "importance". 3. Claude will estimates a lot of percentages and letter grades for things. If you see a percentage or grade, and there's no citation, it might well be a guess by Claude. 4. An emphasis on numeric estimates, models, and diagrams... (read more)
On the costs of high-intensity affective states, which you suggest are high (such that we'd need a special explanation for why they exist):
In affective neuroscience, core emotions are understood as whole-organism control states that recruit neuroendocrine, autonomic, and motivational systems, reorganizing behavior and physiology in ways that may be adaptive in the short term but biologically consequential if prolonged (Panksepp, 1998; McEwen, 2007). Prolonged or poorly regulated aversive states can interfere with feeding
Thanks, Itamar. I’m glad you found the framework useful, and thanks for laying out these concerns.
(1) On selection in life-or-death situations.
I’m less convinced that life-or-death contexts should be treated as marginal for evolutionary explanation. Many such hazards (e.g. fire, severe injury, predation) recur across generations, and even small increases in the probability of rapid withdrawal and survival can be strongly selected for. In that sense, excruciating pain in these contexts looks like a straightforward case of ordinary evolutionary logic at work... (read more)