The idea that the unpleasantness of pain increases superlinearly with its intensity (i.e. an 8/10 on the pain scale is more than twice as bad as a 4/10).

Yeah... I wish we would just say that the 4 is actually lower than 4 and directly track what you mean by "unpleasantness" with these scores, since this is what we care about. But that's not how people use the /10 scale, unfortunately. And that's understandable. If they were, they would seldom say that they're suffering above a 1/10.^[1]

And yes. When researchers/people assign welfare ranges, they think they're tracking "unpleasantness", but I also suspect they are actually tracking what you mean by "intensity" to a large extent, which may lead to very misguided cross-species welfare tradeoffs. I am extremely skeptical of the following counter-view you describe:

If a researcher judges an animal to be at 10% of its capacity, they simply mean 1/10 as bad as its worst state — there's no question about whether 100% is "really" 10x worse, because that's just what the numbers mean by construction.

Maybe that's what they mean, but I doubt that their estimate is not deeply biased by the "unpleasantness"/"intensity" confusion.

To be clear, though, I don't want people to take away that we should care less about insects and shrimp. There are so many other considerations. If anything, this should make us less confident in precise-ish moral weight estimates (and maybe look for projects robust to this uncertainty).

That's a very important problem you raise! Thank you for this. :)

1. ^{^}

   I guess that's why the /10 scale measures what you mean by "intensity," even though I agree with Toby it's not clear what it's even supposed to be.

Great points from you here and from @Mia Fernyhough in another thread! What about in countries where animal advocacy is (almost) nonexistent and where the counterfactual is probably not cage-free, but no change at all? Curious what the two of you (and others) think. I know this does not address all the limitations you raise, but maybe the most crucial ones?

The chatbot completely misses DiGiovanni's point fwiw aha. Literally all of the objections it raises are explicitly addressed in what I've linked or elsewhere in his sequence. :)

No pressure to read anything, though. It's a thorny topic and understanding all the complex details takes time.

This [post-keynesian economics] literature has produced not just a diagnosis of the [cluelessness] problem but a set of practical heuristics and institutional responses that could meaningfully supplement EA analysis in situations of deep uncertainty.

Fwiw, DiGiovanni and myself argue that following such heuristics is not an appropriate response to the deep-uncertainty situation EAs (at least impartial ones) face. We don't directly respond to the literature you cite, but rather to the arguments found in the following refs you might be interested in: Thorstad & Mogensen 2020; Tomasik 2015; The Global Priorities Institute 2024, §§1.2.1 and 4.2.1; Grant & Quiggin 2013.

Thanks for posting this :)

Fwiw, one can very well agree that all pains are comparable in theory, but that the difference between a pinprick and genuine torture is so large that, in practice, the latter will often dominate. I find this harder to "debunk" than antiaggregationism. 

Given our deep uncertainty on i) how many pinpricks outweigh torture and ii) moral weights and welfare ranges,^[1]I certainly don't find it implausible that nematodes, shrimp, or even chickens have experiences that are too mild, relative to other beings, to dominate EV calculations---despite their high numbers and assuming aggregationism.^[2] 

So sure, maybe, in principle, there is a number of warmed up nematodes that outbalances 1 trillion human-years of extreme torture. But this says nothing about tradeoffs we can(not) make between humans and nematodes in the real world.

1. ^{^}

   Well, (i) matters only insofar as it is relevant to (ii), here, but I thought I'd acknowledge (i) separately, still.

2. ^{^}

   And you said things that suggest you agree in this recent interview. You seemed to have deviated from your previous "nematodes (almost) surely dominate" view. Or did I miss something?

I recommend decreasing the uncertainty about how the individual (expected hedonistic) welfare per unit time of different organisms and digital systems compares with that of humans. In particular, I recommend supporting Rethink Priorities (RP) via restricted funding. [...] I committed donating 2 k$ to RP for them to scope out whatever projects they believe would decrease the most cost-effectively the uncertainty about how the individual welfare per unit time of different organisms and digital systems compares with that of humans.

Do you think "whatever projects RP believes would decrease the most cost-effectively the uncertainty" would address your reasons for uncertainty? I haven't yet taken the time to comprehend the details of your current views on hedonistic P(sentience)-adjusted welfare ranges, but I get the sense that your sources of uncertainty on this are not the same as RP's.

Thanks Wladimir! And do you think Birch et al. meant something different from what you describe with the term acuity (instead of resolution)?

Evaluative richness can be further subdivided into evaluative bandwidth and evaluative acuity: “Rich affect-based decision making takes many inputs into account at once (evaluative bandwidth) and is sensitive to small differences in those inputs (evaluative acuity)" ([Birch, Schnell, & Clayton 2020]).

(Emphases are mine.)

Is the bandwidth-acuity distinction the same as the range-resolution one in Alonso & Schuck-Paim (2025)?

Range: The maximum ‘absolute’ value of an affective experience that an organism can perceive, defining the absolute amplitude between the highest or lowest affective intensities possible. A high-range system allows for extreme Pain or pleasure, which may be necessary for strong motivational reinforcement, while a low-range system limits organisms to milder affective states. 

Resolution: How precisely an organism can differentiate between varying levels of affective intensity. A high-resolution system allows for fine distinctions, while a low-resolution system may encode only broad categories, limiting the precision of affective experiences

To explore whether high-intensity Pain can be experienced by primitive sentient organisms, we reframe the question as one of information resolution within a scale of Pain intensities. Briefly, two evolutionary possibilities are considered for how nervous systems evolved to represent varying Pain intensities, enabling appropriate  responses to competing behavioural demands: (1) increasing resolution within a fixed range of intensities (i.e., introducing finer gradations between the minimum and maximum perceived intensity, e.g., 0 to 10) or (2) expanding the range itself of perceived intensities (e.g., extending the maximum perceived intensity value beyond 10, to values like 100, or 1000)

Were you aware of the following? (From Shriver 2024, §3.2.6.)

it’s not immediately obvious that simply having a more discerning ability to evaluate will also entail having the capacity for more intense experiences. Henry Shevlin, in an unpublished draft, proposed two possible accounts of what happens when we add evaluative richness. On the “compression account,” the ends of the spectrum stay as far apart as they were previously, but we add precision in how small the units are that exist between the two poles. However, on the “expansion account,” adding more evaluative states pushes the ends of the spectrum outward. As such, on the expansion account, adding richness would seem to actually increase the range of evaluative states and hence would give us one account of how adding richness could increase a welfare range. To be clear, there was no particular reason to assume that the expansion rather than the compression account is correct, but this does offer one story of how increased neuron counts in affective parts of the brain may increase welfare capacity.

In the above quotes, Shevlin and you are basically saying the same things with different terms, right? Or am I missing something?

(Great post. Thanks for sharing!)

On the cost point — Right, the words I chose made it very unclear whether and when I was talking about only costs, or only benefits, or overall fitness once we combine both, sorry.

On my contradiction — Oops yeah, I meant organisms with lower resolution. My bad.

Thanks for taking the time to reply to all this. Very helpful!