I think it’s worth the perhaps basic reflection that rethink priorities’ animal welfare ranges are so close to humans, and the number of farmed animals so high that any global welfare estimates are going to look terrible using their data. This isn’t a value judgement at all, just a perhaps-obvious observation.
From my perspective, for accuracy the next thing to include should be uncertainty ranges in the graph. For example a graph like this would need that before it could be considered for any serious peer reviewed literature.
Unfortunately even just using rethink’s errors, ranges will be so large it will even make displaying them in a graph difficult.
Another huge source of uncertainty like you mention is wild animal welfare, an even harder area where most EAs I think would estimate their welfare as net negative, whereas some (like me) would estimate it perhaps positive.
As a side note I would love a non EA, non animal rights focused group to do some kind of counter—calculation on welfare ranges so I could see what different assumptions they might make, but that’s probably unrealistic as why would a dispassionate group bother with that kind of difficult work? Maybe we ould just use neuron weights as a counter equivalent?
Again this is a really interesting graph nice one.
Thanks this is great.
I think it’s worth the perhaps basic reflection that rethink priorities’ animal welfare ranges are so close to humans, and the number of farmed animals so high that any global welfare estimates are going to look terrible using their data. This isn’t a value judgement at all, just a perhaps-obvious observation.
From my perspective, for accuracy the next thing to include should be uncertainty ranges in the graph. For example a graph like this would need that before it could be considered for any serious peer reviewed literature.
Unfortunately even just using rethink’s errors, ranges will be so large it will even make displaying them in a graph difficult.
Another huge source of uncertainty like you mention is wild animal welfare, an even harder area where most EAs I think would estimate their welfare as net negative, whereas some (like me) would estimate it perhaps positive.
As a side note I would love a non EA, non animal rights focused group to do some kind of counter—calculation on welfare ranges so I could see what different assumptions they might make, but that’s probably unrealistic as why would a dispassionate group bother with that kind of difficult work? Maybe we ould just use neuron weights as a counter equivalent?
Again this is a really interesting graph nice one.