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I'd like to thank Derek Shiller from Rethink priorities for extensive discussions and looking over this post.

Introduction

I've been following the "animal welfare" debate this week on the EA forum, and noticed that a key crux for a lot of people was that calculations showed that animal welfare campaigns (specifically the "caged chicken corporate campaign") was much more cost effective than a human global health development project like the against malaria foundation. 

But while most estimates agreed that AW was more effective than GHD, I noticed there was a wide discrepancy in how much more effective it was. Vasco Grilo claimed it was 1500 times better. This report by Laura Duffy of rethink priorities (when you convert from order of magnitude to real numbers in table 1) claimed it was about 60 times better. Whereas if you go the Cross cause comparison website, also by RP, and compare the default results of chicken vs "givewell bar", AW only comes off as 35 times better. 

This wouldn't be so surprising, except that all three estimates seem to be using almost the same assumptions and sources. All are adopting hedonic utilitiarianism. All are using the moral weights from the moral weights sequence of RP. All are using the estimates from this report by Saulius about the amount of chickens affected per dollar. All are using the this report by welfare footprint for the amount of time chickens spent in pain under different raising conditions. 

You might think this doesn't matter, but the difference between 1500 times and 35 times is actually quite important: if you're at 1500 times, you can disagree with a few assumptions a little and still be comfortable in the superiority of AW. But if it's 35 times, this is no longer the case, and as we shall see, there are some quite controversial assumptions that these models share. 

Over the last few days, I have attempted to replicate these estimates, determine the key assumptions and cruxes of each calculation, and determine the sources of disagreement. This was developed in a dialogue with RP members, in particular Derek Shiller, you can view us hashing the thing out in excruciating detail in the comments of this post

In this article, I will outline what I found in my replication. I will primarily focus on replicating the work of RP. I think I've identified the source of disagreement with Vasco's work as well, but I haven't looked into their work as much. Note that I'm not trying to state that this model is the correct way to do things. This article is showing you how other people came to their conclusions, to allow for you, the reader, to decide whether you agree or disagree.

The RP model has a few components, which I will break down in turn in the next few sections. I will be using point estimates for the values for clarity, but please note that in the actual reports RP uses monte-carlo style simulations to deal with uncertainty: I think this is good practice.

I have shared my replication of the model here.

Underlying model:

First we need to be clear on what is being compared here. Generally, the comparison is with disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). 

RP describes DALY’s as:

the number of “disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) averted.” A DALY is a health measure with two parts: years of human life lost and years of human life lost to disability. The former measures the extent to which a condition shortens a human’s life; the latter measures the health impact of living with a condition in terms of years of life lost. Together, these values represent the overall burden of the condition. So, averting a DALY is averting a loss—namely, the loss of a single year of human life that’s lived at full health.

The use of DALY’s is pretty common in the world of public health. I assume plenty of people have discussed it's assumptions, but it is well established for public health decisions. 

Note that as far as I can tell these DALYS are purely based on two aspects of morality:

  1. How long a human lives
  2. How much suffering a human experiences. 

Other aspects of morality are not included in the results. So for example, if you were trying to calculate the cost of saving the mona lisa from a fire, the DALY cost would be only be seen in the sadness people feel at missing out on seeing it and the economic cost to louvre employees. A lot of calculations also don't factor in knock-on effects either: as far as I'm aware GHD doesn't try to factor in the pain of a mother losing a child, assuming that it is not large compared to the lost years of life of the child. 

Following on from these, these calculations then use the assumptions used by the RP moral weights project. These assumptions are:

  • Utilitarianism, according to which you ought to maximize (expected) utility.
  • Hedonism, according to which welfare is determined wholly by positively and negatively valenced experiences (roughly, experiences that feel good and bad to the subject).
  • Valence symmetry, according to which positively and negatively valenced experiences of equal intensities have symmetrical impacts on welfare.
  • Unitarianism, according to which equal amounts of welfare count equally, regardless of whose welfare it is.

They discuss these assumptions a lot in the sequence of articles, and explore what happens if you relax some of them. Unitarianism is an assumption which differs a lot from everyday morality, for example, saying that if a human and chicken experience the same amount of pain, they are equally important when making moral decisions. I recommend you check out at least some of the articles in that sequence for their arguments, I will explore the effect this has on calculations later on.

Another important point is that these are estimates for specifically corporate chicken campaigns, which seem to be the best interventions we have semi-decent numbers for. It's possible that investing in AW research will uncover better interventions (like shrimp welfare or something).  

The Saulius report of Chicken years per dollar estimate

The first thing people need to answer is: how many chickens does donating dollars to a corporate campaign actually affect? That is, if you donate a thousand dollars to a cage free campaign, how many chickens do you expect to move, and for how long? 

 RP and pretty much everyone are using this 2019 report from Saulius to estimate the effectiveness of corporate chicken campaigns. It’s good work, and incredibly detailed, so I’d recommend looking over it yourself. 

To summarise, what Saulius did was to thoroughly investigate the campaigns and successes of corporate campaigns for hen and broiler welfare over the period between 2005 and 2018. 

First, they estimated how much money was spent on such campaigns from 2005 to 2018 by all animal rights campaigns that participated in such campaigns. For cage free hens, this was 57 million dollars [1]

Next, they estimated the flock affected per year by companies that had made cage-free or better broiler commitments in that time period as a result of the campaigns.[2] For cage free, that was a flock of 310 million birds per year.

They then multiplied this by the estimated chance of companies actually following through on their commitments (64%), and how many years they expect the commitment to last for (15 years), and divided by the cost of the campaign, to determine that every dollar would, in expectation, move 42 chickens from cages to cage-free environments over the intervention period. 

Each chicken, when moved, is estimated to  live for 1.3 years in the improved conditions (taken from this report here) . This means the total effect, in terms of chicken-years per dollar, is 54 chickens-years per dollar. [3]

Another thing I want to emphasise: this is an estimate of past performance of the entire animal rights movement. It is not an estimate of the future cost effectiveness of campaigns done by EA in particular. They are not accounting for tractableness, neglectedness, etc of future donations.

 Saulius gives one indication that the cost effectiveness could increase (some of the infrastructure costs were one-offs that don’t need to be done again). The rest of their indicators are negative, indicating that future campaigns will be less cost effective. One factor of note is that, as Saulius notes, nearly 70% of the US flock of hens has already been committed to be cage free. If these were the “low hanging fruit” companies, there may be diminishing returns to future campaigns with other countries proving more difficult, and the costs might increase over time. 

In the RP report, they accounted for this probable drop in effectiveness by dropping the effectiveness by a range of 20%-60%. This number is not backed up by any source: it appears to be a guesstimate based on the pros and cons listed by Saulius. Hence there is signifcant room for disagreement here. 

If we take Sallius’s estimate of 42 chickens affected per dollar, and discount it by 40%, we get a median of 42*0.6 = 25.2 chickens affected per dollar. 

Chicken DAlYs per chicken affected

Once you’ve established the number of chicken-years that have been affected by the intervention, you then have to include an estimate for how “good” it is to free each chicken. This involves first estimating how much pain is experienced by hens as a result of being confined to a cage, and then converting those pains to numerical values. 

The estimate of length of time of pain is taken from the welfare footprint project. This project tracked the experience of a bunch of chickens in normal cages, and in cage-free aviaries and counted the number of hours on average each chicken spent in different types of pain over the course of its breeding period (which conveniently enough, it estimates as 1 year).  For example, it says that caged hens experienced 323 hours of "nest deprivation", which it classified as "disabling pain", whereas cage-free hens only experienced 16 hours of nest deprivation, so if time periods were the same, the move averted 323-16 = 307 hours of nest deprivation over the lifetime of the chicken. 

How do you convert this to DALY's?  Well, the RP report takes it's conversion from this report of a global burden of disease study, summarised by RP as:[4]

  • 1 year of annoying pain = 0.01 to 0.02 DALYs
  • 1 year of hurtful pain = 0.1 to 0.25 DALYs
  • 1 year of disabling pain = 2 to 10 DALYs
  • 1 year of excruciating pain = 60 to 150 DALYs

So our 307 hours (307/(365*24) years) of nest deprivation pain averted is worth 307/(365*24)*(2 to 10) = 0.07 to 0.35  chicken-DALYs per bird over it's laying period. When you add up all of these, you get a conversion factor.

 If I take roughly the average DALY conversion factor here, and take into account all the pain I get a total conversion factor of 0.24 DALY's  per chicken. The most important type of pain was disabling, which accounted for 80% of the conversion rate: so where you land on that "2 to 10" conversion rate for disabling pain matters a huge amount for the final result. 

This seems to be a key difference with Vasco grilo's analysis here. I think Vasco's analysis ends up using DALY conversions that are roughly ten times higher than RP is using (and roughly 100 times in the case of excruciating pain).

This also seems to be where I think RP might have made an error. In their calculation, which can be found here, they put the time period of this laying as 1.6 years for caged hens, and 1.2 years for cage free hens. This disagrees with both the ACE report number of 1.3 years for both, and the website reporting the pain numbers, which estimates about 1 year for both. 

This disagreement makes no difference for my analysis, because I just looked at DALY's over the chicken's life. But they normalised everything to be per year, which makes caged hens look better because the reported pain is supposedly over a longer time period. They then used Saulius "chicken-years"[5] estimate, which already included the length of laying time in it (the 1.3 figure), and assumed it was the same for both interventions. This had the effect of reducing the estimated impact of the intervention by something around 40%. 

It's worth pointing out that the RP method shouldn't actually care about the average wellbeing of the chicken: only the total wellbeing over the lifetime of each intervention. I didn't look too much into Vascos model, but I think it does matter the way he does it. 

If we combine Saulius's estimate with this conversion factor, we get 25.2  chickens per dollar, times 0.24 DALY's per chicken per year = 6.014 DALY’s per dollar, or 6014 DALYs per thousand dollars. Note that these are Chicken-DALY's, not human-DALYS, we cover the conversion in the next section. 

Capacity for welfare

When we have referred to DALY’s so far in these calculations, we have been referring specifically to “chicken DALY’s”: how much we are reducing bad experiences in chickens. However, when doing a cross cause comparison, this number has to be compared with “human DALYS”.

This means we need to answer a question of how much we should trade off human suffering for animal suffering. 

For example, say you are forced to choose between inducing a headache in one human for an hour, versus inducing a headache in X chickens for an hour. How high would X have to be before you chose to hurt the human instead of the chickens? 

How about if instead of a regular headache for one hour, it was a painful migraine lasting for an entire year? How many chickens would you hurt to spare a human from this experience?[6]

One extreme end, you can imagine an extreme speciest, who doesn’t care about the suffering of non-humans at all. They would place X as “unlimited”: they would happily torture a billion chickens to spare one human a headache. Given that factory farming is broadly opposed by the public, this does not seem like a common view. 

On the other extreme end, you can imagine a total equalist.[7] They would say that a chicken and a human are morally equivalent, X=1.  They would rather save two chickens from suffering than one human. Given that 86% of the world eats meat, this would also be a rather unpopular opinion. 

A common view has been that you should weight the importance of animals by neuron weight. Either because you think more intelligent creatures matter more, or perhaps that they experience pain and pleasure “less intensely”.  In the post “ why neuron counts shouldn’t be used as proxies for moral weight”, RP critiques this view, explaining that there aren’t a lot of good arguments for using it. Neverthelees, it does accord more with intutitions about which animals are more important. If you stick to this view, Chickens have approximately 250 million neurons, humans have about 86 billion neurons, hence 1 human is as important as 430 chickens.

So what is the number for Rethink priorities? They have outlined their methodology in extensive detail in the “moral weights sequence”. I will try and summarise here, but you should trust what they write over my summary.  

Essentially they are trying to gauge the intensity of the range of pleasure/pain experiences in each animal, compared to a human.

In the sequence they summarise their method:

  1. Make some plausible assumptions about the evolutionary function of valenced experiences
  2. Given those functions, identify a lot of empirical traits that could serve as proxies for variation with respect to those functions
  3. Survey the literature for evidence about those traits
  4. Aggregate the results

In essence, they are trying to find various animal behaviours that could indicate a level of sensory experience, and then use those to determine the intensity of experience. These are summarised in this spreadsheet. An example of a quantitative measure would be the change in heart rate when subjected to painful heat: a humans hart rate changes about twice as much as a chicken for a similar stimulus. . Or qualitavely, they can look at different behaviours: A chicken will react negatively when their child is distressed, whereas a shrimp will not, so this gives some indication a chicken is more morally salient than a shrimp.  Overall there is evidence that chickens feel pain and pleasure, and react to these in ways at a first level similar to what a human would. 

They also factor in the probability of chickens being sentient at all, which they put at around 80%. Read their report on this matter for their justifications.

So, with all that analysis, what value do they put on for X? 

It’s about 3, only slightly higher than the extreme equalist. The moral weight of chickens is set at 0.332 of humans. I take them to be saying that chickens experience pain at about a third of the intensity of humans (with 1 or 2 orders of magnitude of uncertainty)

Note that there is uncertainty here. The 95% range for octpuses actually rises above 1 to 1.47, implying they think theres a decent chance that octopuses feel more hedonic pleasure/pain than humans.  it’s also very important to state that you have to take lifespan into account if you are talking about saving lives. They are not saying that saving a childs life is as important as saving three chickens lives. Since humans live ten times as long, they are saying that saving a childs life is as important as saving 24 chickens lives. 

There's plenty of arguments about these figures, so I won't continue the argument here. In my doc I examine the effect of switching from RP weights to neuron weights, which would drop the estimated cost effectiveness by two orders of magnitude. 

If we take the our value of 6014 chicken DALYs per thousand dollars, and weight it by 0.332, we get a final value of  of 6014*0.332 = 1996 Human-DALYS equivalent per thousand dollars.

In my replication document, I did a similar estimate for Broilers, getting an answer of 246 DALYS per thousand dollars. 

Human welfare comparison:

The GHD estimate was pretty similar between sources: they claim that a top tier global health charity like AMF is yielding about 20 DALYs per thousand dollars. I think this estimate originates from this report. Note that this is for saving lives: The conversion rate used seems to be saying that saving a childs life in a poor african country is equivalent to preventing about 50 DALY's of suffering. 

My final answers for cost effectiveness:

So factoring this in, correcting what I believe to be errors, and also accounting for the controversial moral weights, my estimate, if I follow the RP methodology and assumptions (which should not be taken as an endorsement of these methods), is as follows.

For the intervention of cage free campaigns, using RP's moral weights, the intervention saves 1996 DALY's per thousand dollars, about a 100 times as effective as AMF. 

For the intervention of cage free campaigns, using naive neuron count weights, the intervention saves 17 DALY's per thousand dollars, about the same effectiveness as AMF. 

For the intervention of better broiler campaigns, using RP's moral weights, the intervention saves 246 DALY's per thousand dollars, about a 10 times as effective as AMF. 

For the intervention of better broiler campaigns, using naive neuron count weights, the intervention saves 2.2 DALY's per thousand dollars, about 10 times less effective than AMF. 

Explaining the various figures I introduced the post with:

The 60 times figure from this report seems to be a result of the laying time error I discussed earlier. I replicated their answer (i believe) in the Laura replication tab on my spreadsheet.

The 35 times figure on the cross intervention comparison website is inexplicable to me: I think the numbers entered in as the default values are just wrong. I think it's a cool tool though. 

Vasco's figure of 1500 times as effective appears to be a result of having DALY conversion factors that are roughly ten times what RP uses, along with not discounting for less effective future campaigns. I'm not saying he's wrong, just that these are the key differences in assumptions. I haven't looked too closely, but I was able to get similar figures by upping the DALY weights in the broiler model. 

You may be able to spot further problems with this analysis: hopefully I have made it easier to do so. Remember: Don't just take numbers as they are: all numbers rely on assumptions and calculations made by fallible humans who make mistakes sometimes. Many numbers floating around EA are not checked thoroughly, and it is often extremely easy to make mistakes. 

I have gained a lot of respect for the extreme amount of work, effort and transparency RP put into their research: however I believe they still made mistakes which substantially affected their results. You should take the numbers from any org that is less thorough with even more skepticism. 

 

  1. ^

    (reported median values for ease of following)

  2. ^

     a certain number of hens would have been freed without the campaign: an estimate of this is included in the calculation.  

  3. ^

    You have to be careful: this is not chickens per year per dollar, this is chickens times years per dollar. Doubling the number of chickens or doubling the length of intervention would both double this final value. This is the source of a lot of confusion, but fortunately, we can cancel this out.

  4. ^

    Note that these are human years to human DALY's: RP assumes these are the same conversions as chicken years to chicken DALY's. 

  5. ^

    if you look at the hens affected  per dollar CF campaign field, you get a value of 36.2. This is just Saulius figure of 54 discounted by 40%.

  6. ^

    Note that there are knock on effects from the human being . Cost effectiveness evaluations include some, but not all knock on effects.

  7. ^

    footnote: I guess you could also have someone who thinks chickens are more important than humans, but let’s not go that far.

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I'm running an EA intro group, and this perfectly answers a couple of questions that people had that I didn't know how to word answers to. On another note, while I agree with many of these points, I agree with @Vasco Grilo🔸 that RP has probably significantly underestimated the effect of pain on life.

Thanks for this detailed presentation. I think it serves as a helpful, clear, and straightforward introduction to the models and uncovers aspects of the original model that might be unintuitive and open to question. I’ll note that the model was originally written by Laura Duffy and she has since left Rethink Priorities. I’ve reached out to her in case she wishes to jump in, but I’ll provide my own thoughts here.

1.) You note that we use different lifespan estimates for caged and cage-free hens from the welfare footprint. The reasons for this difference are explained here. However, you are right that though we attribute longer lives for caged hens – on the assumption that they are more often molted to extend productivity – we don’t adjust the hours-spent-suffering of caged hens, and that the diluted suffering of caged hens leads to a less effective verdict in the model.

I see three choices one could have made here: discard our lifespan assumptions, try to modify the welfare footprint hours-spent-suffering inputs, or keep the welfare footprint inputs paired with our longer lifespans. The final option is in some sense a more conservative choice and is the one we went with (but I can’t say whether it was an oversight or a deliberate choice).

Your alternative approach of using the welfare footprint numbers for both hours spent suffering and lifespan estimates seems sensible to me and would be less conservative.

2.) I believe some of the differences in your approach and ours may be explained by our desire to account for differences in productivity between hens in each environment. Our model includes estimates of eggs per chicken and assumes there need to be more cage-free hens to produce the same number of eggs. By lobbying for cage-free systems, you also increase the number of chickens confined in farms. This is accounted for in the variable Ratio CF/CC Hens, which we estimate to be 1.05. Including this further reduces the efficacy of cage-free campaigns because transitioning will increase the number of total hens.

"On the other extreme end, you can imagine a total equalist.[7] They would say that a chicken and a human are morally equivalent, X=1.  They would rather save two chickens from suffering than one human. Given that 86% of the world eats meat, this would also be a rather unpopular opinion. "

I ran a survey in Belgium: the majority of meat eaters put X=1 (or better: their answers to the questions logically entail X=1)  https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2024/05/21/the-suffering-of-a-farmed-animal-is-equal-in-size-to-the-happiness-of-a-human-according-to-a-survey/

The survey question was, in Dutch:

Imagine the worst suffering a [dog, bird, fish (for example a salmon), shrimp, fly] can experience. Try to compare this suffering with the worst suffering a human can experience. How intense or severe do you think is the worst suffering of a [dog, bird, fish, shrimp, fly] for an hour compared to the worst suffering of a human for an hour?

The detailed results are here, including a histogram for birds:

Whether the answers to this question imply moral equivalence between humans and birds, though, depends on the assumption that the respondents are something close to hedonistic utilitarians, and I doubt they are? For example, if the survey had instead given questions specifically about moral weight ("how many birds would you need to be saving from an hour of intense suffering before you'd prioritize that over doing the same for a human", etc) you'd have seen different answers.

I would be surprised if most people had stronger views about moral theories than about the upshots for human-animal tradeoffs. I don't think that most people come to their views about tradeoffs because of what they value, rather they come their views about value because of their views about tradeoffs.

I agree. It strongly depends on the framing of questions. For example, I asked people how strongly they value animal welfare compared to human welfare. Average: 70%. So in one interpretation, that means  1 chicken = 0.7 humans. But there is a huge difference between saving and not harming, and between 'animal' and 'chicken'. Asking people how many bird or human lives to save, gives a very different answer than asking them how many birds or humans to harm. People could say that saving 1 human is the equivalent of saving a million birds, but that harming one human is the equivalent of harming only a few birds. And when they realize the bird is a chicken used for food, people get stuck and their answers go weird. Or ask people about their maximum willingness to pay to avoid an hour of human or chicken suffering, versus their minimum willingness to accept to add an hour of suffering: huge differences. (I conducted some unpublished surveys about this, and one published: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21606544.2022.2138980.) In short: in this area you can easily show that people give highly inconsistent answers depending on the formulations of the questions.

Thanks for this post, I was also struggling with how scattered the numbers seemed to be despite many shared assumptions. One thing I would add:

Another thing I want to emphasise: this is an estimate of past performance of the entire animal rights movement. It is not an estimate of the future cost effectiveness of campaigns done by EA in particular. They are not accounting for tractableness, neglectedness, etc of future donations....

In the RP report, they accounted for this probable drop in effectiveness by dropping the effectiveness by a range of 20%-60%. This number is not backed up by any source: it appears to be a guesstimate based on the pros and cons listed by Saulius. Hence there is signifcant room for disagreement here. 

If we take Sallius’s estimate of 42 chickens affected per dollar, and discount it by 40%, we get a median of 42*0.6 = 25.2 chickens affected per dollar. 

Last year Open Phil stated that their forward-looking estimate was 5x lower than Saulius' backward-looking estimate. This is the type of 'narrow' question I default defer to Open Phil on, and so I would drop your final figures by a factor of 3, going from 60% of Saulius to 20% of Saulius.

Thanks for the analysis, titotal. Since you discuss some of my work, I would have appreciated it if you had shared a draft of your post before publishing it, or at least had told me when you were going to publish it.

Vasco's figure of 1500 times as effective appears to be a result of having DALY conversion factors that are roughly ten times what RP uses, along with not discounting for less effective future campaigns.

On the other hand, I used the chicken-years per $ of broiler campaigns instead of that of both broiler and cage-free campaigns, which contributes towards underestimating cost-effectiveness. As I say in the post:

Note Saulius estimates broiler and cage-free campaigns affect 41 chicken-years per dollar, 2.73 (= 41/15) times as much as the broiler campaigns on which I am relying.

In a subsequent post, I used the chicken-years per $ of both broiler and cage-free campaigns discounted for a lower future cost-effectiveness, and concluded corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 1.51 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.

I arrived at a cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for chicken welfare of 15.0 DALY/$ (= 8.20*2.10*0.870), assuming:

  • Campaigns affect 8.20 chicken-years per $ (= 41*1/5), multiplying:
    • Saulius Šimčikas’ estimate of 41 chicken-years per $.
    • An adjustment factor of 1/5, since OP [Open Philanthropy] thinks “the marginal FAW [farmed animal welfare] funding opportunity is ~1/5th as cost-effective as the average from Saulius’ analysis [which is linked just above]”.
  • An improvement in chicken welfare per time of 2.10 times the intensity of the mean human experience, as I estimated for moving broilers from a conventional to a reformed scenario based on Rethink Priorities’ median welfare range for chickens of 0.332[6]. [Note I should have ideally used an improvement in chicken welfare per time referring to hens and broilers, instead of just broilers. I may post a cost-effectiveness analysis with separate results for broiler and cage-free corporate campaigns in the future.]

  • A ratio between humans’ healthy and total life expectancy at birth in 2016 of 87.0 % (= 63.1/72.5).

In light of the above, corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are 1.51 k (= 15.0/0.00994) times as cost-effective as TCF [GiveWell's Top Charities Fund].


  • 1 year of annoying pain = 0.01 to 0.02 DALYs
  • 1 year of hurtful pain = 0.1 to 0.25 DALYs
  • 1 year of disabling pain = 2 to 10 DALYs
  • 1 year of excruciating pain = 60 to 150 DALYs

I think RP's assumptions underestimate the badness of severe pain. If 1 year of excruciating pain is equivalent to e.g. 94.9 DALY (= (60*150)^0.5), 15.2 min (= 24*60/94.9) of excruciating pain neutralise 1 day of fully healthy life, whereas I would say adding this much pain to a fully healthy life would make it clearly negative. Here is how the Welfare Footprint Project defines excruciating pain (emphasis mine):

All conditions and events associated with extreme levels of pain that are not normally tolerated even if only for a few seconds. In humans, it would mark the threshold of pain under which many people choose to take their lives rather than endure the pain. This is the case, for example, of scalding and severe burning events. Behavioral patterns associated with experiences in this category may include loud screaming, involuntary shaking, extreme muscle tension, or extreme restlessness. Another criterion is the manifestation of behaviors that individuals would strongly refrain from displaying under normal circumstances, as they threaten body integrity (e.g. running into hazardous areas or exposing oneself to sources of danger, such as predators, as a result of pain or of attempts to alleviate it). The attribution of conditions to this level must therefore be done cautiously. Concealment of pain is not possible.

The global healthy life expectancy in 2021 was 62.2 years, so maybe one can roughly say that a child taking their live due to excruciating pain would loose 50 years of fully healthy life. Under my assumptions, 0.864 s of excruciating pain neutralise 1 day of fully healthy life, so 4.38 h (= 0.864*50*365.25/60^2) of excruciating pain neutralise 50 years of fully healthy life. However, I guess many people take their lives (if they can) after a few seconds (not hours) of excruciating pain. So, even if people should hold excruciating pain a few orders of magnitude longer to maximise their own welfare, my numbers could still make sense. 4.38 h is 5.26 k (= 4.38*60^2/3) times as long as 3 s (a few seconds). One complication is that people may be maximising their welfare in taking their lives because excruciating pain quickly decreases their remaining healthy life expectancy, such that there is a decreased opportunity cost of taking their lives.

Well written. I think the point on the badness of excruciating-level pain is really underemphasized, and would like to write a post about that at some point.

I'd love to try surveying the general population with thought experiments to find people's empirical tradeoffs of pain levels. My personal intuitions are definitely closer to your weights than Rethink's. I think a survey would be really valuable since it would provide probability distributions of pain level conversions which could augment a cross-cause model.

In case it's useful, Adam Shriver and I ran a workshop about this issue with some pain scientists and animal welfare scientists, and reported some of our findings here: https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/dimensions-of-pain-workshop-summary-and-updated-conclusions. Welfare Footprint also wrote about it recently: https://welfarefootprint.org/2024/02/20/shortagony-or-longache/. Both reports cover some of the relevant survey data.

Also, I have found it useful to directly incorporate uncertainty about the appropriate severity weights directly into welfare footprint-style models, as we recently did for shrimp aquaculture welfare threats: https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/quantifying-and-prioritizing-shrimp-welfare-threats

Thanks, Ariel.

I'd love to try surveying the general population with thought experiments to find people's empirical tradeoffs of pain levels.

It looks like the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS) is looking into this:

Suffering survey
We are currently working on a quantitative overview and visualisation of world suffering, including both humans and non-human animals. As part of this study, in September 2024 we launched a survey to assess intensity and duration of suffering in humans across a range of conditions and situations. The survey also asks questions about the nature of the suffering and any measures that were found to be effective in relieving it. The survey will remain open at least until the end of 2024.

The survey is mainly multiple-choice, takes about 5-15 minutes to complete, and can be filled out anonymously. Anyone who has experienced significant suffering, physical or psychological, in the past or present, can participate, and provide information on 1-3 life conditions. We would be grateful if you would consider participating and also sharing it widely within your network!

This is the survey link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfMDXXSA-6MtPlDhhbzVv8XYIh6zvXbZcqeZJBPbHwMBIIhww/viewform

I have just completed it, and it took me 15 min.

I forgot to say OPIS’ survey did not look into the types of pain defined by the Welfare Footprint Project.

This is all highly speculative, and here's my highly speculatory speculation.

I agree excruciating pain is very very bad andi might lean towards your numbers vasco rather than OPs for very short periods of time in that kind of pain

I just find it highly questionable that animals both experience anything like that level of pain a while also experiencing it for very long periods of time. Can they dissociate? are they numbed?

Even for lesser amounts of pain, given how continuous it is over time in horrendous battery farms there's a decent chance of some kind of numbing or dissociation thing going on which might reduce the total suffering in the long term.

But I say this very cautiously and it probably wouldn't matter a huge difference in calculations anyway.

As you wrote, there's no view on this I'm confident in. But speaking from having had certain enduring experiences of suffering, like being very sick for weeks on end, or being bullied at school for years, at times life can just be enduringly awful. Yes, one can develop certain coping mechanisms to make the bad times easier to bear, but if the bad times are bad enough, I think they do just make life consistently far worse. Evidence from an earlier post of mine:

  • Extreme pain or discomfort reduces health-related quality of life by 41%.
  • Nerve damage results in a loss of health-related quality of life between 39% for diabetes-caused nerve damage and 85% for failed back surgery syndrome.
  • Suffering from cluster headaches is associated with greatly increased suicidality.
  • Patients suffering from chronic musculoskeletal pain would rather take a gamble with a ⅕ chance of dying and a ⅘ chance of being cured than continue living with their condition.

I also think that many coping mechanisms (e.g. "I'm suffering for a cause! Or for my children!" etc) are mostly possible because the suffering being has higher order brain function which allows those complex ideas to have similar mental sway to the feeling of suffering. So it feels plausible to me that a chicken would have a harder time "coping" with suffering than a human in an equivalent situation.

To quantify my subjective and very uncertain feelings on the matter, I'd put a 40-80% probability that coping mechanisms don't reduce chickens' suffering by more than 50% relative to the undiluted experience. But I think reasonable people can have all sorts of views on this, and would love to see further research.

"Extreme pain or discomfort reduces health-related quality of life by 41%.

"Nerve damage results in a loss of health-related quality of life between 39% for diabetes-caused nerve damage and 85% for failed back surgery syndrome."

This makes sense - one interesting point here is that failed back surgery syndrome and severe nerve damage are some of the more severe and chronic pains humans suffer (makes me shudder thinking about it TBH, have a couple of friends who have suffered from that) yet people still lead "net positive" lives with the pain and usually want to keep living. 

"I also think that many coping mechanisms (e.g. "I'm suffering for a cause! Or for my children!" etc) are mostly possible because the suffering being has higher order brain function which allows those complex ideas to have similar mental sway to the feeling of suffering. So it feels plausible to me that a chicken would have a harder time "coping" with suffering than a human in an equivalent situation." That's true - its also true that human's complex ideas lead us vulnerable to complex mental health issues which can modulate pain to make it worse. I'd be so uncertain as to be 50/50 on whether modulation effects would be worse for humans.

"To quantify my subjective and very uncertain feelings on the matter, I'd put a 40-80% probability that coping mechanisms don't reduce chickens' suffering by more than 50%"
- This sounds fair enough


 

FWIW, I suspect RP's DALY conversions are too low for the badness of pain assuming hedonism.

Here's what RP wrote about the weights (from here, extending what you quoted in your post):

I used the following conversion factors to translate the duration of each of the four types of pain into DALY equivalents: 

 

  • 1 year of annoying pain = 0.01 to 0.02 DALYs
  • 1 year of hurtful pain = 0.1 to 0.25 DALYs
  • 1 year of disabling pain = 2 to 10 DALYs
  • 1 year of excruciating pain = 60 to 150 DALYs

 

I arrived at these intensity-to-DALY conversions by looking at the descriptions of and disability weights assigned to various conditions assessed by the Global Burden of Disease Study in 2019 and comparing these to the descriptions of each type of pain tracked by the Welfare Footprint Project. 

 

Reasoning about the weights directly: DALYs are normalized to reflect the life of a typical person in perfect health (DALY weight 0). Such a life still contains some suffering, frustration, boredom, and I'd guess the joys only reach an intensity similar to disabling pain for brief periods at a time (e.g. laughter) or basically never at all. As a result, I'd put 1 year of hurtful pain close to 1 DALY at a minimum, and possibly higher. And disabling pain seems at least 5x as bad/intense as hurtful pain to me, so 1 year of disabling pain should be at least around 5 DALYs.

I'm personally more sympathetic to disabling pain being ~50x more intense than hurtful pain (or higher), which would give something like 50 DALYs per year of disabling pain.

 

The report also doesn't explain the exact process for getting these numbers, but some potential sources of bias worth flagging:

  1. DALY weights in the literature do not (I'd guess) reflect being in such pain every (waking) hour of your life in a year, but 1 year of X pain does, by assumption.
  2. DALY weights in the literature don't assume hedonism at all, and probably reflect what's at stake non-hedonically for someone if they were to die early or other things they care about, because the responses used to estimate them come from people who are not usually hedonists. They therefore overestimate the hedonic value of life in full health.

These could both lead to underestimating the badness of pain.

The report might have accounted for these, but I can't tell.

Also, for comparisons to global health in particular, we should be thinking about what a life in full health for the potential beneficiaries of the relevant charities would be like. They still live in poverty and spend a lot of time working, which are sources of frustration, stress and discomfort. It wouldn't surprise me to find out their lives are (mildly) net negative hedonically, even if they prefer to live on the whole and judge their lives as positive.

Saving their lives could still be good under hedonism even if their lives turn out to be net negative hedonically, if and because it increases the hedonic welfare of others enough. Losing a child is traumatic and horrible. And there are economic benefits to saving lives, which should reduce the stressors of poverty.

"It wouldn't surprise me to find out their lives are (mildly) net negative hedonically, even if they prefer to live on the whole and judge their lives as positive"

Can you explain this a bit more? I would be surprised based on subjective well-being studies at least if very many people's lives we all are "net negative hedonically"

"beneficiaries of the relevant charities would be like. They still live in poverty and spend a lot of time working, which are sources of frustration, stress and discomfort"

Poverty and working can be sources of stress and discomfort, but going from that to net negative seems like a large leap?

I wouldn't say I'm confident either way.

Subjective well-being studies are usually not assessing hedonic well-being, but life satisfaction. People can be satisfied with their lives because they have things important to them that are going well (family, friends, other goals), or by comparing their lives to others' around them, and these can be more important to them than their own average hedonic wellbeing when they judge their own lives.

If you have particular studies in mind that get at hedonic well-being ("affect" in the literature, sometimes via experience sampling) specifically, I'd be interested in them, though. I haven't really looked into this myself. I'm just doing the accounting intuitively by imagining how people spend their time. And a lot of that is work (including housework, cooking), and probably more so for poor people in low-income countries.

(FWIW, I'm not a hedonist.)

Subjective well-being studies are usually not assessing hedonic well-being, but life satisfaction. People can be satisfied with their lives because they have things important to them that are going well (family, friends, other goals), or by comparing their lives to others' around them, and these can be more important to them than their own average hedonic wellbeing when they judge their own lives.

 

I agree, but I would go further and say that I don't think we have good reason to think that people have a reliable sense of the hedonic balance of their lives, even if we suppose they have good introspective access to the valence of their discrete experiences.

Thanks David I do definitely agree with this. How can we as complex beings have a reliable sense of the "hedonic balance" of our lives, if we can even comprehend what that means exactly to us (I certainly can't)

I would bet though regardless that most of my friends, many of whom you @MichaelStJules might consider very poor, stressed and living in discomfort have extremely net positive lives even just looking straight hedonically. The joy of their families, cooking, time with friends. The joy they find from the non-hedonic meaning itself. From hope for the future of their kids lives (who have more education than they do). Etc. etc.

The frustration and the pain is there, but apart from maybe people here with severe illness or severe depression (a minority), it seems very net positive to me on any metric?

I can't read the "hedony meters" of those around me here, but I would take their subjective wellbeing as a better approximation of it than almost any other measure I could imagine (and I'm aware there are others).

FWIW I don't begrudge any of these opinions and think this is a very reasonable conversation :)

I'm curating this post. I see this and @NickLaing's post as the best in class on the topic of moral weights from the AW vs GH debate week, so I'm curating them as a pair[1].

I was impressed by titotal doing the fairly laborious work of replicating everyone's calculations and finding the points where they diverged. As discussed by the man himself, there were lots of different numbers flying around, and even if AW always comes out on top it matters by how much:

You might think this doesn't matter, but the difference between 1500 times and 35 times is actually quite important: if you're at 1500 times, you can disagree with a few assumptions a little and still be comfortable in the superiority of AW. But if it's 35 times, this is no longer the case, and as we shall see, there are some quite controversial assumptions that these models share.

  1. ^

This is an interesting post. 

Regarding neuron weights, I came across an interesting discussion last week on a post discussing RP's Moral Weight Projects. During this discussion, this comment by @David Mathers🔸 says this (emphasis mine):

I am far from an unbiased party since I briefly worked on the moral weight project as a (paid) intern for a couple of months, but for what it's worth, as a philosophy of consciousness PhD, it's not just that I, personally, from an inside point of view, think weighting by neuron count is bad idea, it's that I can't think of any philosopher or scientist who maintains that "more neurons make for more intense experiences", or any philosophical or scientific theory of consciousness that clearly supports this. The only places I've ever encountered the view is EAs, usually without formal background in philosophy of mind or cognitive science, defending focusing near-termist EA money on humans. (Neuron count might correlate with other stuff we care about apart from experience intensity of course, and I'm not a pure hedonist.)

For one thing, unless you are a mind-body dualist-and the majority of philosophers are not-it doesn't make sense to think of pain as like some sort of stuff/substance like water or air, that the brain can produce more or less of. And I think that sort of picture lies behind the intuitive appeal of more neurons=more intense experiences. 

The author, @NickLaing, confirmed this:

I had a bit of a scan and I couldn't find [references to neuron count for moral weight] outside the EA sphere

I was surprised because, given the frequency at which neuron counts are discussed on the forum, it felt from the outside like a position that could have some academic credibility.

Personally, this makes me think that neuron count should not be considered among the most credible ways of comparing the moral weight of different species (unless further evidence arises, of course).
 

Of course, I understand discussing this while emphasising the speculative aspect ("what if neurons were actually important?"). But I think that saying: "Here's the conclusion with RP's moral weight projects, here's the conclusion with neuron count", gives way too much credibility to neuron counts as a measure, given the lack of evidence behind this position.

Like I said on the other thread, I don't think other researches (at least not the ones cited by RP that I could access) are thinking much about quantifying pain let alone comparing the quantity to human pain. Instead they are making models for potential neural pathways that could help differentiate which animals might experience pain and which might not. They are mostly (to put it simply) asking a "Yes/No" question in which case I agree neuron count is probably irrelevant to the question of whether animals feel pain or not.

But IMO this means the fact they haven't talked about neuron count isn't much of a datapoint against neuron counts as a potential element of a comparative measure between humans and animals.

If there was a decent amount of research out there comparing moral weights outside the EA sister that dismissed neuron count, I would feel differently.

I'm not very convinced. At the very least, this absence of discussion should be a significant update against using neuron count as proxy of moral value right now. Or at least until significant evidence has been provided that it can be a useful measure (of which I'd expect at a minimum acknowledgment by a number of top experts). Otherwise it's akin to guessing.

Even if scientists are usually not very concerned by comparing the moral value of different beings, I'd expect that they'd still talk significantly about the number of neurons for other reasons. For instance, I'd expect that they would have formulated theories of consciousness that are based on the number of neurons, and where the experience 'expands' where there are more of them. (I am not formulating it in a precise way but I hope you get the idea)

Should we evaluate the potential of neuron count as a proxy ? Yes.

Should we use it to make significant funding allocation decisions with literal life or death consequences based on it ? No. At least not from what I've seen.

What you really want to look at-I haven't properly-is the literature on what determines pain intensity, and, relatedly, what makes pain feel bad rather than good, and what makes pain morally bad. That'll tell you something about how friendly current theory is to "more neurons=more intense experiences", even if the papers in the literature don't specifically discuss whether that is true.   

That is probably a good idea, although the burden of proof isn't really on me here. It's on the proponent of using neuron count as a proxy for moral weight. But it would be interesting if they did that, indeed.

Executive summary: A replication and analysis of animal welfare cost-effectiveness calculations reveals significant discrepancies between estimates, ranging from 35 to 1500 times more effective than global health interventions, due to differing assumptions and potential errors in methodology.

Key points:

  1. Key factors affecting calculations: chicken-years affected per dollar, conversion of chicken pain to DALYs, and moral weighting of animal vs. human welfare
  2. Saulius report estimates 25.2 chickens affected per dollar for corporate campaigns, accounting for future effectiveness decline
  3. Conversion of chicken pain to DALYs based on welfare footprint project and global burden of disease study
  4. Rethink Priorities' moral weights assign chickens 0.332 times the moral value of humans
  5. Author's corrected estimates: cage-free campaigns 100x more effective than AMF using RP weights, equal to AMF using neuron count weights
  6. Discrepancies in other estimates explained by potential errors and differing assumptions in DALY conversion factors

 

 

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