Category: Measuring Sentience
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How do animals tolerate pain when being eaten alive?
Read answers on Quora
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Preparatory notes for an Algometry
Measurement and estimation are of prime importance for most rational activities dealing with suffering, and quantitative studies concerning suffering should be developed as an independent subdiscipline, which could be called algometry. Read more
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Empathetic feedback was able to reduce pain intensity perception
Empathetic verbal feedback from others has been shown to alleviate the intensity of experimental pain on an experiment on pain perception and empathy in humans. In the experiment they created a dedicated setup mimicking a medical environment where people enduring painful stimuli received empathetic or unempathetic comments from others. Positive (empathetic) feedback was able to…
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A pain cream with no active ingredients worked even when not used
Placebos are so effective that placebo placebos work: A pain cream with no active ingredients worked even when not used by the patient. Just owning the cream was enough to reduce pain. Read more
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Asymmetries and compensations between pleasure and pain
There are two very related questions: “Is there a symmetry between suffering and enjoyment?” and “Can suffering be compensated with enjoyment?” Investigating the way in which we respond to these questions is very relevant, since we may have biases or blindness that are encouraging to make bad decisions, such as the survivorship bias. By better understanding…
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Graph of causes of death in humans by Mike Huemer
Graph of causes of death in humans by Mike Huemer Text by Mike Huemer: What’s killing us? I made the following graph. I include the top ten causes of death in the U.S., plus homicide and illegal drug overdoses, because the latter two are actually discussed in political discourse. Observations: 1. The top causes of…
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Ron Anderson on causes of extreme suffering in humans
Ron Anderson (Ronald E. Anderson) from worldsuffering.org on causes of extreme suffering in humans.
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Why Does Very Hot Water Sometimes Feel Cold?
Cold receptors primarily react to temperatures ranging from 68 to 86˚F, while warm receptors are activated between 86˚F and 104˚F. At extreme temperatures—below 60˚F and beyond 113˚F—the temperature signal is accompanied by a sensation of pain. Weirdly, researchers have discovered that at temperatures greater than 113˚F, some cold receptors can also fire. The majority of…
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Disadvantages of the measures
We usually start measuring what we can measure well, and we lack motivation to try to measure what we cannot measure well. In this way, the measurement makes invisible the elements that are more difficult to measure although they could be much more relevant. This increases the risk of ignoring those other elements and even…