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Curated and popular this week
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Notes
The following text explores, in a speculative manner, the evolutionary question: Did high-intensity affective states, specifically Pain, emerge early in evolutionary history, or did they develop gradually over time?
Note: We are not neuroscientists; our work draws on our evolutionary biology background and our efforts to develop welfare metrics that accurately reflect reality and effectively reduce suffering. We hope these ideas may interest researchers in neuroscience, comparative cognition, and animal welfare science.
This discussion is part of a broader manuscript in progress, focusing on interspecific comparisons of affective capacities—a critical question for advancing animal welfare science and estimating the Welfare Footprint of animal-sourced products.
Key points
Ultimate question: Do primitive sentient organisms experience extreme pain intensities, or fine-grained pain intensity discrimination, or both?
Scientific framing: Pain functions as a biological signalling system that guides behavior by encoding motivational importance. The evolution of Pain signalling —its intensity range and resolution (i.e., the granularity with which differences in Pain intensity can be perceived)— can be viewed as an optimization problem, where neural architectures must balance computational efficiency, survival-driven signal prioritization, and adaptive flexibility.
Mathematical clarification: Resolution is a fundamental requirement for encoding and processing information. Pain varies not only in overall intensity but also in granularity—how finely intensity levels can be distinguished.
Hypothetical Evolutionary Pathways: by analysing affective intensity (low, high) and resolution (low, high) as independent dimensions, we describe four illustrative evolutionary scenarios that provide a structured framework to examine whether primitive sentient organisms can experience Pain of high intensity, nuanced affective intensities, both, or neither.
Introdu
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Article 5 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:
"Obviously, no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
OK, it doesn’t actually start with "obviously," but I like to imagine the commissioners all murmuring to themselves “obviously” when this item was brought up.
I’m not sure what the causal effect of Article 5 (or the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture) has been on reducing torture globally, though the physical integrity rights index (which “captures the extent to which people are free from government torture and political killings”) has increased from 0.48 in 1948 to 0.67 in 2024 (which is good). However, the index reached 0.67 already back in 2001, so at least according to this metric, we haven’t made much progress in the past 25 years. Reducing government torture and killings seems to be low in tractability.
Despite many countries having a physical integrity rights index close to 1.0 (i.e., virtually no government torture or political killings), many of their citizens still experience torture-level pain on a regular basis. I’m talking about cluster headache, the “most painful condition known to mankind” according to Dr. Caroline Ran of the Centre for Cluster Headache, a newly-founded research group at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.
Dr. Caroline Ran speaking at the 2025 Symposium on the recent advances in Cluster Headache research and medicine
Yesterday I had the opportunity to join the first-ever international research symposium on cluster headache organized at the Nobel Forum of the Karolinska Institutet. It was a 1-day gathering of roughly 100 participants interested in advancing our understanding of the origins of and potential treatments for cluster headache. I'd like to share some impressions in this post.
The most compelling evidence for Dr. Ran’s quote above comes from a 2020 survey of cluster headache patients by Burish et al., which asked patients to rate cluster headach
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A while back (as I've just been reminded by a discussion on another thread), David Thorstad wrote a bunch of posts critiquing the idea that small reductions in extinction risk have very high value, because the expected number of people who will exist in the future is very high: https://reflectivealtruism.com/category/my-papers/mistakes-in-moral-mathematics/. The arguments are quite complicated, but the basic points are that the expected number of people in the future is much lower than longtermists estimate because:
-Longtermists tend to neglect the fact that even if your intervention blocks one extinction risk, there are others it might fail to block; surviving for billions (or more) of years likely requires driving extinction risk very low for a long period of time, and if we are not likely to survive that long, even conditional on longtermist interventions against one extinction risk succeeding, the value of preventing extinction (conditional on more happy people being valuable) is much lower.
-Longtermists tend to assume that in the future population will be roughly as large as the available resources can support. But ever since the industrial revolution, as countries get richer, their fertility rate falls and falls until it is below replacement. So we can't just assume future population sizes will be near the limits of what the available resources will support.
Thorstad goes on to argue that this weakens the case for longtermism generally, not just the value of extinction risk reductions, since the case for longtermism is that future expected population is many times the current population, or at least could be given plausible levels of longtermist extinction risk reduction effort. He also notes that if he can find multiple common mistakes in longtermist estimates of expected future population, we should expect that those estimates might be off in other ways. (At this point I would note that they could also be missing factors that bias their estimates of
I just looked at the application for the role of content specialist for CEA, which seems to involve a lot of working on this forum.
I noticed that if one indicates they have been personally referred by someone 'involved in effective altruism', one is given the option to skip 'the rest of the application' - which seems like the majority of the substantive information one is asked to give.
This seems overtly nepotistic, and I can't think of a good reason for it - can anyone give one?
The rest of the application seems to be optional also if one indicates that they have not been personally referred by someone. Do you get something different?
https://www.loom.com/share/c0ef87a96a1c4d28bfc0df2e48d7662b
Oh I see, thanks! - I didn't realise this because the statement that appears after indicating you've been personally referred is: "Since you were referred to this position, the rest of the application is optional" which makes it sound like it wouldn't be optional if you weren't referred.
I think that the short hand of "this person vouches for this other person" is a good enough basis for a lot of pre-screening criteria. Not that it makes the person a shoe in for the job, but it's enough to say that you can go by on a referral.
You might say, this is a strange way to pick people, but this is how governments interview people for national security roles. They check references. They ask questions.
I imagine more questions would be asked to the third party who is 'personally referring' the applicant, leading to a slightly different series of interviews anyway. In my experience, people have to work a lot harder to get a job, than to keep one. I know that it's true with everyone that referred me to just about every position. Then if I perform badly it looks poorly on them, but after a certain time, I'm the one referring people onwards, so I have to make my own assessment of if I'm willing to put my reputation on the line.
Yeah but I think it relies too much on a given applicant's estimate of how well CEA knows or how much they trust the connection.
Some reasons could be
a) The purpose of the rest of the questions is to inform the initial sift, and not later stages of the application, and if you have been referred by a trusted colleague, then there is no further use of the optional questions to the initial sift, so it would be a waste of applicants’ time
b) Saving applicants’ time on the initial application makes you likely to receive more applications to choose from
However, these referrals could indeed have a nepotistic effect by allowing networking to have more of an influence on the ease of getting to stage 2.
I was referred to apply to this job by someone who was close to another hiring round I was in (where I reached the final stage but didn’t get an offer).
I can see that this does not feel great from a nepotism angle. However, as Weaver mentions the initial application is only a very rough pre-screening, and for that, a recommendation might tip the scales (and that might be fine).
Reasons why this is not a problem:
First, expanding on Weavers argument:
If the application process is similar to other jobs in the EA world, it will probably involve 2-4 work trials, 1-2 interviews, and potentially an on-site work trial before the final offer is made. The reference maybe gets an applicant over the hurdle of the first written application, but won't be a factor in the evaluation of the work trials and interviews. So it really does not influence their chances too much.
Secondly, speaking of how I update on referrals: I don't think most referrals are super strong endorsements by the person referring, and one should not update on them too much. I.e. most referrals are not of the type "I have thought about this for a couple of hours, worked with the person a lot in the last year, and think they will be an excellent fit for this role", but rather "I had a chat with this person, or I know them from somewhere and thought they might have a 5%-10% chance of getting the job so I recommended they apply".
Other reasons why this could be bad:
1. The hiring manager might be slightly biased and keep them in the process longer than they ought to (However, I do not think this would be enough to turn a "not above the bar for hiring" person into the "top three candidate" person). Note that this is also bad for the applicant as they will spend more time on the application process than they should.
2. The applicant might rely too much on the name they put down, and half-ass the rest of the application, but in case the hiring manager does not know the reference, they might be rejected, although their non-half-assed application would have been good.
tabforacause - a browser extension which shows you ads and directs ad revenue to charity - has launched a way to set GiveDirectly as the charity you want to direct ad revenue to.
It doesn't raise a lot of money per tab opened, obviously, but I'm not using my newtab page for anything else and find the advertising unobtrusive - its in the corner, not taking up the whole screen - if. you're like me in these respects it could be something to add.
Thanks for pointing this out; I'll note that Partners in Health is also available, and GiveWell seems to like them but doesn't think that they beat the GiveWell charity bar, at least when this was written (https://www.givewell.org/international/charities/PIH#:~:text=Partners%20in%20Health%20provides%20comprehensive,network%20of%20community%20health%20workers.). I'd be interested in seeing anything about whether Partners in Health is a better option than GiveDirectly.