As for medians rather than means, our main concern there was just that means tend to be skewed toward extremes. But we can generate the means if itās important!
Do you think the extremes of your moral weight distributions are reasonable? If so, even if the mean is skewed towards them, it would become more accurate. Anyways, I would say sharing the mean would be important, such that people could see how much influence extremes have (i.e. how heavy-tailed is the moral weight distribution).
Sorry for the slow reply, Vasco. Here are the means you requested. My vote is that if people are looking for placeholder moral weights, they should use our 50th-pct numbers, but I donāt have very strong feelings on that. And I know you know this, but I do want to stress for any other readers that these numbers are not āmoral weightsā as that term is often used in EA. Many EAs want one number per species that captures the overall strength of their moral reason to help members of that species relative to all others, accounting for moral uncertainty and a million other things. We arenāt offering that. The right interpretation of these numbers is given in the main post as well as in our Intro to the MWP.
Thanks for clarifying and sharing the means, Bob! There are some significant differences to the medians for some species, so it looks like it would be important to see whether the extremes of the distributions are being well represented.
Hi again,
Sorry, I forgot to touch on this point:
Do you think the extremes of your moral weight distributions are reasonable? If so, even if the mean is skewed towards them, it would become more accurate. Anyways, I would say sharing the mean would be important, such that people could see how much influence extremes have (i.e. how heavy-tailed is the moral weight distribution).
Sorry for the slow reply, Vasco. Here are the means you requested. My vote is that if people are looking for placeholder moral weights, they should use our 50th-pct numbers, but I donāt have very strong feelings on that. And I know you know this, but I do want to stress for any other readers that these numbers are not āmoral weightsā as that term is often used in EA. Many EAs want one number per species that captures the overall strength of their moral reason to help members of that species relative to all others, accounting for moral uncertainty and a million other things. We arenāt offering that. The right interpretation of these numbers is given in the main post as well as in our Intro to the MWP.
Thanks for clarifying and sharing the means, Bob! There are some significant differences to the medians for some species, so it looks like it would be important to see whether the extremes of the distributions are being well represented.