Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Modelling the outcomes of animal welfare interventions: One possible approach to the trade-offs between subjective experiences, published by Animal Ask on May 29, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
TLDR: To guide our research on new interventions for the animal advocacy movement, we need a framework that allows us to quantify the subjective experiences of animals. For example, if we were comparing two campaigns - say, a) phasing out fast-growing breeds or broiler chickens and b) implementing more humane pesticides for use on crops - we would need to produce a quantitative estimate of the potential impact of these two campaigns.
Note that we also consider many qualitative factors - this quantitative estimation represented by our framework is only one piece of information among many that we use.
This report is also available on Animal Ask website.
Downloadable version in pdf
Executive summary
At Animal Ask, we spent most of 2023 conducting prioritisation research to identify the most promising goals and strategies for the animal advocacy movement. The aim of that project was to identify goals and strategies that could be more impactful than the current leading campaigns (e.g. cage-free campaigns). If we succeed, we can unlock new opportunities for the movement to help even more animals.
This article outlines one component of the methodology we used for that research. Specifically, to guide our research on new interventions for the animal advocacy movement, we needed a framework that allows us to quantify the subjective experiences of animals.
For example, if we were comparing two campaigns - say, a) phasing out fast-growing breeds to reduce suffering in broiler chickens and b) implementing more humane pesticides to reduce suffering in wild insects killed on agricultural land - we would need to produce a quantitative estimate of the potential impact of these two campaigns.
In essence, our framework allows us to systematically compare different campaign opportunities in how good they are for animals - and these comparisons can be made across different species, across different intensities of experience (e.g. mild vs extreme suffering), and across both positive and negative experiences.
The framework allows us to be clear and transparent about the worldviews, philosophical positions, and/or empirical assumptions that are used in drawing conclusions about particular campaigns.
In this report, we outline our framework. The key characteristics of the framework are:
The framework is cumulative, meaning that it considers the total duration of an animal's experience over time. In fact, our framework is heavily based on the existing Cumulative Pain framework, which was developed by the researchers Wladimir J. Alonso and Cynthia Schuck-Paim.
The framework allows experiences to be adjusted. We can place different moral weights on more intense experiences - for example, we might think that preventing extreme suffering is more important than preventing mild suffering, all else being equal.
The framework incorporates the fact that uncertainty is high, and society has simply not made much progress on many of the core questions relating to trade-offs between different subjective experiences.
We advise serious caution when applying the ideas from our framework (or any framework on this topic). As any statistician knows, no model is a perfect representation of reality. When we're looking at the specific question of moral trade-offs between different subjective experiences, things get seriously murky. We view this framework as a tool to help us think quantitatively, subject to the serious limitations to society's knowledge.
We chose to describe our framework in this article so we can be transparent about our research methods, allowing others to see how we reach particular conclusions a...

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