Great question, Tobias. Yes, less research on a species generally reduces our welfare range estimate. I agree with you that it would be better, in some sense, to have our confidence increase in a fixed estimate rather than having the estimates themselves vary. However, we couldn’t see how to do that without invoking either our priors (which we don’t trust) or some other arbitrary starting point (e.g., neuron counts, which we don’t trust either). In any case, that’s why we frame the estimates as placeholders and give our overall judgments separately: vertebrates at 0.1 or better, the vertebrates themselves within 2x of one another, and the invertebrates within 2 OOMs of the vertebrates.
Great question, Tobias. Yes, less research on a species generally reduces our welfare range estimate. I agree with you that it would be better, in some sense, to have our confidence increase in a fixed estimate rather than having the estimates themselves vary. However, we couldn’t see how to do that without invoking either our priors (which we don’t trust) or some other arbitrary starting point (e.g., neuron counts, which we don’t trust either). In any case, that’s why we frame the estimates as placeholders and give our overall judgments separately: vertebrates at 0.1 or better, the vertebrates themselves within 2x of one another, and the invertebrates within 2 OOMs of the vertebrates.