Thanks for the post, Linch.

Taken together, these factors suggest war between rational actors should be declining. The empirical evidence largely supports this, though with important caveats.

I estimated the year explains 8.45 % of the variance in the logarithm of the annual conflict deaths as a fraction of the global population from 1400 to 2000, with a slope of -0.279 orders of magnitude per century, corresponding to that fraction becoming 52.6 % (= 10^-0.279) as large per century.

Thanks for the great post, Güney!

Side note. The link to your LinkedIn profile on your EA Forum page is broken.

Thanks for clarifying, Wladimir. I will also try to clear up my point. In the same way you seem to prioritise decreasing disabling and excruciating pain much more than decreasing annoying and hurtful pain (in particular, much more than justified by pain intensities), I was thinking some may prioritise decreasing excruciating pain much more than decreasing disabling pain. Some people may even go further, and prioritise decreasing the most intense forms of excruciating pain, potentially to an extent cage-free reforms would have very small benefits due to not decreasing the maximum pain intensity. For example, one may only care about the worst 0.1 s of a chicken's life (arguably during stunning or slaughter), and this be almost exactly as bad for hens in conventional cages and cage-free aviaries.

Thanks, Michael, and welcome to the EA Forum! Corrected.

Thanks, Wladimir. Note prioritising decreasing the most intense pain may lead to counterintuitive conclusions. According to WFI, hens in furnished cages experience slighly less excruciating pain than ones in cage-free aviaries. So I do not think there is a strong case for moving from furnished cages to cage-free aviaries if one only prioritises decreasing excruciating pain, which is the most intense category of pain defined by WFI.

I assume you also value decreasing less intense pain, but not proportionally to intensity. I guess decreasing pain which is 50 % as intense is less than 50 % as valuable in your mind, whereas I would say it is 50 % as valuable holding duration, and probability constant.

Thanks for the elaboration, Adam! That makes sense.

Thanks for the context, Saulius!

Thanks, Saulius! That makes sense.

Thanks for the suggestions, Thomas! Would you like to make the following bet?

• If the global energy consumption as reported by Our World in Data (OWID) increases by more than 25 % from year Y to Y + 1, for any Y <= 2033 (such that the maximum Y + 1 is 2034, before 2035), I donate 12 k$ to an organisation or fund of your choice in July 2035 (OWID updates their data in June).
• Otherwise, you donate 4 k$ to an organisation or fund of my choice in July 2035.

Your expected gain is more than 0 (= (0.25*12 - (1 - 0.25)*4)*10^3), but sufficiently so? You said ">25% [probability of you winning the bet above]", and "maybe more [than an annual increase of 25 %]".

This is not an official proposal. I would like to think about it some more, and then formalise the bet with a post.

Thanks, Xing. The bet resolves as long as FRED reports the unemployment rate, even if this is not reliable. We did not discuss what would happen if FRED does not report the unemployment rate. In this case, we could agree to use another similar source.