We're looking at livelihoods research again (contribute ideas or reach out to support the team with your expertise), sharing our new methods site, and releasing updated SADs guidance.
Looking at livelihoods and growth again
We last conducted research into livelihoods and growth in 2024, leading to the launch of great projects including Lead Research for Action, Better Futures Guide, and other upcoming projects.
We will be working on finding more ideas in this space, trying to focus on more exploratory plays with leverage to influence growth agendas in LMICs. We are especially excited to look further into energy transitions, artificial intelligence for development, remittances, migration, and infrastructure.
You can read our house view on livelihoods and growth here.
- Contribute ideas to our initial brainstorm through this form
- Could you support our research? Reach out to me with your CV and a blurb if you have experience in this sector and want to support our agenda in some capacity (which may include full time fellowships).
A new site
In an effort to make our work more transparent, we have uploaded our methodological guidance and live house views to a giftbook site. In there, you will find:
- Our "takes" on certain topics, such as how to think about the impact of education, or our charity taxonomy.
- Notes on methods, such as our approach to prioritization, and cost-effectiveness.
- All content from our now-closed AIM Research Training Program
Suffering-adjusted Days revamp
After much support and feedback from many individuals (thanks especially to Sam Hilton and Vicky Cox), we have now created updated guidance and models on our SADs approach to quantifying animal welfare harms. You can read more about our update to the method here.
I think it is great that you have shared this.
Thanks for the update. You estimate that excruciating pain is 48.0 (= 11.7/0.244) times as intense as hurtful pain. This implies 16 h of "awareness of Pain is likely to be present most of the time" (hurtful pain) is as bad as 20.0 min (= 16/48.0*60) of "severe burning in large areas of the body, dismemberment, or extreme torture" (excruciating pain). In contrast, I think practically everyone would prefer 16 h of hurtful pain over 20 min of excruciating pain.
Hey Vasco - thanks for this. As we write in the update, we are unlikely to pay much mind to scaling in the near future, in part because it has proved difficult to put numbers onto scaling in a way that satisfies us.
Hi Morgan. I think you are referring to this.
Have you considered disaggregating the results even further by not comparing welfare across species? I agree comparisons of pains of different types (annoying, hurtful, disabling, or excruciating) within the same species are very uncertain. However, the same applies to comparisons of pains of the same type across species? I would say comparing 1 h of disabling pain in shrimps with 1 h of disabling pain in humans is much harder than comparing 1 h of disabling pain in humans with 1 h of excruciating pain in humans. For an intensity of a given type of pain proportional to "individual number of neuron"^"exponent", and "exponent" from 0 to 1, which covers the best guesses than I consider reasonable, 1 h of a given type of pain in shrimps is 10^-12 to 1 times as intense as 1 h of the same type of pain in humans, as shrimps have 10^-6 times as many neurons as humans. Here is some context about my uncertainty.
I would present 6 cost-effectiveness estimates:
People could then change the pain intensity ratios, and sentience-adjusted welfare range to get their own estimates if they want. I believe presenting all the estimates above is useful because people have very different views about not only pain intensities, but also welfare comparisons across species.
At the same time, I would keep the last of the above cost-effectiveness metrics to increase transparency about trade-offs between different pain intensities and species. The trade-offs will still be made even if they are not quantified, and I worry they will be harder to examine and improve on if they are not made explicit.
@Morgan Fairless, @vicky_cox, and @Vince Mak 🔸, would you find useful a time trade-off (TTO) survey asking people suffering from cluster headaches about the Welfare Footprint Institute's (WFI's) pain intensities? They may have recently experienced disabling and excruciating pain. I assume the vast majority of people who contributed to Ambitious Impact's (AIM's) estimates of the pain intensities have not recently experienced excruciating pain. So I believe such survey would provide much stronger evidence about the intensity of excruciating pain. I am asking you because AIM and Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) are the 2 organisations using WFI's pain intensities in cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs).
Hi Vasco,
Thanks for your suggestion. I have limited capacity so apologies if I don't answer promptly. Thanks for your suggestion on how to present CEAs, we'll think about this further.
Note: I am certainly not an animal welfare expert, and there may be very different views on this that I am not covering.
I am not sure marginal research money should be spent on pain scaling questions, I am also not bullish on most pain scaling surveys.
I prefer having stronger research on the quantification of pain in different production systems (i.e., funding welfare science that aligns to existing proposed frameworks) and exploration of other research questions.
I believe this because:
TTO surveys are super interesting and informative. As per the above I'd personally spend money on other research questions instead.
If someone were to go ahead with this. I'd be curious to try to predict what the learnings from such a survey could tangibly influence, as I expect they'd get tangled in a bunch of questions about validity anyways. Given the subjective nature of pain, I am not convinced a survey sampling from such a specific group is particularly externally valid (I also don't know that any survey of humans will ever be externally valid to how we'd scale pain across other animals).
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Great.
A greater spread of pain intensities would update me (at the margin) towards prioritising very painful welfare issues happening over a short time (in particular, just before slaughter) over less painful ones affecting the whole life of animals
I also wonder whether there are cases where the time in less intense pain is decreased cost-effectively, but the time in more intense pain is increased. In such cases, one would have to rely on views about pain intensities to determine whether there is a reduction in pain. The Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI) estimates that cage-free layers experience less annoying and hurtful pain than ones in furnished cages, but that it is unclear whether they experience more or less disabling and excruciating pain. "The analysis primarily aimed to estimate the minimum welfare improvement associated with transitioning to cage-free housing". So it could be that cage-free layers also experience less disabling and excruciating pain. However, if this remains unclear accounting for all welfare issues as accurately as possible, and one believes disabling and excruciating pain are much more intense than annoying and hurtful pain, it could be unclear whether cage-free egg campaigns decrease or increase pain.
I am also not confident. However, I think there is high value of information in making at least one good attempt to quantify the intensity of excruciating pain.
I agree comparisons across different pain intensities and species will remain very uncertain.
Here is a comment from Bob Fischer with context about the uncertainty in the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges Rethink Priorities (RP) initially presented, and the similar ones in Bob's related book which I understand inform your own estimates a lot.
It's awesome to see AIM's renewed focus on livelihoods and growth! Deena Mousa at Coefficient Giving has been working on how LMICs can best position themselves to capture the gains from recent AI advances, and gave an insightful talk on the topic at EAG London (which I happened to attend :). I would really recommend speaking with her if you haven't already.