Thank you Vasco

AGREE ON THERE BEING SOME VALUE FOR MORE RESEARCH

I agree AIM 2025 SADS were below ideal robustness and as such I have spent much of the last few weeks doing additional research to improve the pain scaling estimates. If you have time and want to review this then let me know.

I would be interested in Rethink Priorities or others doing additional work on this topic.

AGREE ON THE LIMITS OF CONDENSING TO A SINGLE NUMBER

I have adapted the 2026 SAD model to give outputs at the four different pain levels, as well as a single aggregated number. This should help users of the model make their own informed decisions and not just focus on the one number.

I DISAGREE ON NOT USING THE RESEARCH WE HAVE

Where I disagree is where you say we basically have no idea how to compare different levels of pain, and your suggestion that we should not be doing so. 

1. Every time we make a decision EG to focus on an issue of stocking densities rather than slaughter methods, we are ultimately deciding to focus on less extreme but longer lasting forms of pain. Being as explicit as we can about our numbers and our thinking helps us make those decisions better (as long as we don't overly rely on a single number).
2. We do have some data and we should use it to inform our decisions and our numbers. This includes academic studies of people in pain, including those with severe conditions, and self-reports from people who experienced extreme pain.

DISAGREE ON NOT BELIEVING PEOPLE

Less important but: I also disagree on your suggestion not to trust the standard academic approach of asking about / people's responses on "worse pain imaginable". Maybe sometimes people overestimate how bad that is sometimes underestimate it. You seem to be claiming these women (or the whole public) are en mass systematically underestimating. That is a strong claim and not one I would put much weight on without good evidence.

Yes that are (often known) systematic over and underestimation effects. This can be addressed by asking similar questions in different ways that aim to elicit different biases, or by having a back and forth between questioner and respondent to seek consistency.

If research does not match our intuitions we need to be objective in judging the value of that research and not claim systematic bias without evidence.

Hi Vasco. Firstly, it should be noted that the overall ratio used for the 2025 SADs was 1000x not 7x. The updated 2026 ratio based on more extensive research is 50x.

Secondly on "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 pain for 2 hours than a 1/10 pain for 18 hours!

Finally, I defend putting at least some weight on counter-intuitive results of academic research. I especially defend this in the case where you are analysing and pooling the results of many papers and expect some results to be bias upwards and some results to be bias downwards. The new SAD spreadsheet links to 15 different studies / pieces of evidence on this topic. Of those 15 some of which show counterintuitively low and some counterintuitively high relative preferences for different levels of pain. I think it is better to put weight on all of them based on the quality of the evidence they present not be (overly) guided by an intuitive sense of the results we want to find.
 

Thank you done.

UK political animal welfare work

I believe it is a relatively common beekeeping practice to clip a wing of the queen bee to prevent the colony leaving

Bioweapons are an existential risk.

With current technology probably not an x-risk. With future technology I don’t think we can rule out the possibility of bio-sciences reaching the point where extinction is possible. It is a very rapidly evolving field with huge potential.

I think people working on animal welfare have more incentives to post during debate week than people working on global health.

The animal space feels (when you are in it) very funding constrained, especially compared to working in the global health and development space (and I expect gets a higher % of funding from EA / EA-adjacent sources). So along comes debate week and all the animal folk are very motivated to post and make their case and hopefully shift a few $. This could somewhat bias the balance of the debate. (Of course the fact that one side of the debate feels they needs funding so much more is in itself relevant to the debate.) 

Hi there, I was wondering what you mean by "real estate speculation": what the issue is and in what ways it is tractable? Thank you for any insights you can give, hoping to do some research into housing issues in LMICs :-)