I’m not sure how important Krogh’s Principle is in animal cognition research of the kind we’re interested in; my impression is that the animals that are studied are primarily animals that are well-studied, like fruit flies, bees, mice, rats, cats, dogs, farmed animals and the stereotypically smart ones (corvids, parrots, elephants, cetaceans, primates), and the animals EAs are interested in fall into these groups. When I want to know about chicken cognition, I just look for studies on chickens. It’s worth mentioning that Rethink Priorities stuck to relatively narrow taxons in their report.
I do agree that this research is likely to be biased overall to produce more positive than could be reproduced or generalized. However, I also think that the priors are already very skeptical (e.g. Morgan’s canon over Occam’s razor and despite common descent) so scientists are also likely to attribute fewer and less complex mental states to animals than I think best explains the evidence, and it’s pretty clear that we’ve systematically underestimated their capacities, so it’s likely the current state of research underestimates them overall, too.
Or, rather, researchers aren’t using Bayesian reasoning in the first place, so they aren’t really using priors at all in interpreting evidence; I think Morgan’s canon is more like a p-value threshold than a prior.
Of course, we can just use our own priors in interpreting the evidence, and in doing so, we should take into account biases towards positive results in research.
I’m not sure how important Krogh’s Principle is in animal cognition research of the kind we’re interested in; my impression is that the animals that are studied are primarily animals that are well-studied, like fruit flies, bees, mice, rats, cats, dogs, farmed animals and the stereotypically smart ones (corvids, parrots, elephants, cetaceans, primates), and the animals EAs are interested in fall into these groups. When I want to know about chicken cognition, I just look for studies on chickens. It’s worth mentioning that Rethink Priorities stuck to relatively narrow taxons in their report.
I do agree that this research is likely to be biased overall to produce more positive than could be reproduced or generalized. However, I also think that the priors are already very skeptical (e.g. Morgan’s canon over Occam’s razor and despite common descent) so scientists are also likely to attribute fewer and less complex mental states to animals than I think best explains the evidence, and it’s pretty clear that we’ve systematically underestimated their capacities, so it’s likely the current state of research underestimates them overall, too.
Or, rather, researchers aren’t using Bayesian reasoning in the first place, so they aren’t really using priors at all in interpreting evidence; I think Morgan’s canon is more like a p-value threshold than a prior.
Of course, we can just use our own priors in interpreting the evidence, and in doing so, we should take into account biases towards positive results in research.