– Measurement
Last update: 2024-12-14
Preparatory notes for this chapter
Regarding the measurement of suffering, various studies have been done that may be useful, such as those found in Preparatory Notes for the Measurement of Suffering. However, the discipline specialized in the study of suffering is only beginning to develop, so we don’t yet have the kind of comprehensive knowledge required for our enterprise.
Sections:
Quantification for the Expansion of Our Enterprise
Our aim in this section is to establish a rough estimate of what the success of our enterprise requires in terms of hours of work or dollars spent. The following exploratory calculations could form part of the discipline specializing in the study of suffering, since the amount of resources (in time and money) used to successfully control suffering represents pretty accurately the amount of unpleasant occurrences of consciousness that are affected. Visible resources are easier to count than occurrences of suffering, and we can count indifferently in terms of hours of work or dollars spent, since both have a mutual exchange value.
A first degree of satisfactory success on a global scale would be for us to optimally minimize by 10 % the occurrences of consciousness that we consider too unpleasant. This would require x (millions) hours or y (billions) dollars, as shown in the table below. So far, a number of hours (50K ?) or dollars (1M ?) have been invested, making it possible to succeed in the first stage of realization (“The idea of establishing a central place to systematically address the problem of suffering in the world is good enough…”) because the idea of our World Center has now been proposed to a few groups of well-advised Internet users who approved it. Another number of hours (4K ?) or dollars (200K ?) will be required to succeed in the second stage of realization (“… bring a few dedicated persons to elaborate a first scaled-down version of the Center that is interesting enough…”).
There can be as many subdivisions as we like in the second stage. Right now, since volunteer work can’t take us as far as we need to go in our enterprise, our very first step must be to invest a certain number of hours (1.5K ?) or dollars (30K ?) to find the money needed to pay a standard-level manager and a few workers who will be able to carry out the second stage.
Table of time and monetary resources used in the 7 stages of expansion of our enterprise: (to come…)