This doesn’t make any sense to me at all. There’s a ton of hidden assumptions there that are glossed over, e.g.
Larger animals might have more capacity for suffering, but intuitively they might have 10x more or 100x more at most. Meanwhile, small animals are 1000x or 10000x more numerous than large animals. So the scale advantage of small animals is more important, and thus we should prioritize small animals.
This implicitly assumes that whatever resources we have will (a) help the same percentage of global population, no matter which animals we select and (b) reduce their suffering by the same percentage.
> Higher-frequency information is valuable, but a quarterly survey is 4x more expensive than an annual survey, and its information is probably not 4x more valuable. So the cost advantage of less frequent surveys is more important, and thus we should fund the survey annually rather than quarterly.
This assumes that the value of the information from the survey is only slightly higher than its cost. Let’s imagine that the cost to conduct the survey is $10k and the information gained is worth $1M. In that case doing the survey quarterly (+$30k) would only need to increase the value of the information gained by 3% to break even
This doesn’t make any sense to me at all. There’s a ton of hidden assumptions there that are glossed over, e.g.
This implicitly assumes that whatever resources we have will (a) help the same percentage of global population, no matter which animals we select and (b) reduce their suffering by the same percentage.
> Higher-frequency information is valuable, but a quarterly survey is 4x more expensive than an annual survey, and its information is probably not 4x more valuable. So the cost advantage of less frequent surveys is more important, and thus we should fund the survey annually rather than quarterly.
This assumes that the value of the information from the survey is only slightly higher than its cost. Let’s imagine that the cost to conduct the survey is $10k and the information gained is worth $1M. In that case doing the survey quarterly (+$30k) would only need to increase the value of the information gained by 3% to break even