Thanks Vasco. After thinking about the numbers myself, I agree that allowing for states worse than death can't on its own do a lot to make the numbers comparable between GiveWell and SWP. I do actually think it would move the numbers more than you're accounting for there, both because the deaths prevented by GiveWell top charities might involve more than 7.5 minutes of excruciating pain and because GiveWell top charities prevent a lot of morbidity among people who end up surviving (and I think they're significantly underweighting the value of this, e.g. clean water interventions prevent about 6 person-years of being sick with waterbone illnesses for everyone person who dies, and I would significantly prefer to be in a dreamless sleep than be conscious with a severe enteric infection.^[1] But the DALY weight for severe diarrheal illness is 0.247, implying 3/4ths the wellbeing^[2] of being fully healthy). But this is at most going to change the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell top charities by a factor of 2, not 4 OOMs.

As for the 10000x difference in weights between disabling and excruciating pain, I have to admit I'm pretty confused here. On the one hand, it strikes me as fundamentally implausible that suffocating is 10000x worse than dying of heatstroke. On the other hand, some of my intuitions do lean towards not being willing to endure e.g. burning to death for almost anything else. I'll need to spend some time reviewing the literature before I try and make further sense of how to best make these tradeoffs.

Thanks again for all your work and engagement here, I think it's genuinely quite valuable to be having these conversations!

1. ^{^}

   I took some notes on my willingness to make these tradeoffs when I was recently sick with norovirus and am hoping to write a short post on this soon!  

2. ^{^}

   DALY weights are a measure of health status, not wellbeing, but that hasn't stopped anyone from using them as a unit of wellbeing

I also ranked Arthropoda first! I'm quite bullish on the value of information in the animal welfare space, and think that on the current margin they would do extremely valuable work. 

Though I've made some comments that disagree with some of Vasco's specific numbers, I agree that SWP is extraordinarily effective and ranked them a close second after Arthropoda!

(Crossposted from twitter)

While I'm a big fan of SWP and have donated to them myself, I am skeptical of claims like

 This makes [SWP] around 30 times better at reducing suffering and promoting well-being than the highly effective animal charities focused on chicken welfare which themselves are hundreds or thousands of times more effective than the best charities helping humans.

I greatly appreciate @Vasco Grilo🔸 for writing up his analysis, but I don't think that most people would agree with some of the assumptions made in it regarding pain intensity:

For air asphyxiation: time in disabling pain equal to the maximum time during which shrimp can remain alive of 30 min, although Aaron noted he and his colleagues have seen some alive for 6 h; time in excruciating pain as a fraction of that in disabling pain equal to that of ice slurry (0.126 h); time in hurtful pain as a fraction of that in disabling pain equal to that of ice slurry (0.00633 h); and time in annoying pain as a fraction of that in hurtful pain equal to that of ice slurry (0 h).

[...]

• Annoying pain is 10 % as intense as fully healthy life.
• Hurtful pain is as intense as fully healthy life.
• Disabling pain is 10 times as intense as fully healthy life.
• Excruciating pain is 100 k times as intense as fully healthy life.
• RP’s median welfare range of shrimps of 0.031.

My assumptions for the pain intensities imply each of the following individually neutralise 1 day of fully healthy life:

• 10 days (= 1/0.1) of annoying pain.
• 1 day of hurtful pain.
• 2.40 h (= 24/10) of disabling pain.
• 0.864 s (= 24*60^2/(100*10^3)) of excruciating pain.

Vasco estimates that asphyxiating shrimp experience about 7.5 minutes of excruciating pain, and weights this as 10000x worse than disabling pain, which is the maximum pain experienced by a chicken during a keel bone fracture or death from heat exhaustion (in the data used to generate the THL numbers). Moreover, the data he relies on for the cost effectiveness of GiveWell top charities does not allow for the existence of states worse than death. This means that he's estimating that the pain experienced during asphyxiation is 100000x the worst pain prevented by GiveWell. This seems highly implausible to me. Surely dying of malaria or diarrheal disease involves some pain that is within 100000x the intensity of suffocation (and indeed WFP estimates that sepsis in a chicken involves excruciating pain, so I would expect that sepsis in a human does as well).

None of this is to say that SWP is ineffective, merely that the cost-effectiveness ratios compared to other EA top charities citied here seem overly high to me. 

Congrats, Sjir!

Thanks for looking at this Vasco, it's always great to see others doing this kind of cost-effectiveness analysis. 

Your results indicate a substantially higher direct cost-effectiveness for SWP relative to the analysis I did last year. From looking at your methodology, I believe our primary difference comes from a difference in weighting the relative badness of different levels of pain. I used the same numbers as a 2023 RP report which weighted excruciating pain as 33 times worse than hurtful pain, while your weights put excruciating pain at 100000x worse than hurtful pain. 

I've updated towards thinking 33x is probably at least an order of magnitude too low (and more recent RP reports have used weights in the vicinity of 600x), but I would personally be skeptical of 100000x. 

Of course much of SWP's impact is through creating systemic change, so I don't want to over-emphasize the importance of these direct impact CEAs, as valuable as they are.

Great list (and thanks for the shoutout)! 

I would add @Laura Duffy's How Can Risk Aversion Affect Your Cause Prioritization? post

I believe the values come from the 10th anniversary edition of the TLYCS book. They should be in the FAQ on the website and I'm surprised they're not. 

I think mainstream longtermist EA is already on a path to try and help create the hedonium shockwave if and only if it's the right thing to do. The "only if" part seems really important - turning 99.999% of the accessible universe into hedonium seems like a quite bad idea unless you're extraordinarily confident in your ethical views. But it does seem like one theoretically possible outcome of the type of long reflection MacAskill advocates in WWOTF:

As an ideal, we could aim for what we can call the long reflection: a stable state of the world in which we are safe from calamity and we can reflect on and debate the nature of the good life, working out what the most flourishing society would be. I call this the “long” reflection not because of how long this period would last but because of how long it would be worth spending on it. It’s worth spending five minutes to decide where to spend two hours at dinner; it’s worth spending months to choose a profession for the rest of one’s life. But civilisation might last millions, billions, or even trillions of years. It would therefore be worth spending many centuries to ensure that we’ve really figured things out before we take irreversible actions like locking in values or spreading across the stars.

It's really not clear to me that there's a better path to the hedonium shockwave than what longtermsists are already doing - trying to ensure humanity survives and prospers and makes it to a place where we have more hope of reaching a consensus about whether or not it's the right course of action. Of course, if the shockwave really is the right thing to do, waiting to start it would lead to a great deal of astronomical waste. But this is a small price to pay relative to the risks of destroying ourselves or causing great harm if our moral views are wrong. 

Yeah this is a really good point, I have no idea how to square the numbers with big grants from OP to THL