Love this type of research, thank you very much for doing it!
I’m confused about the following statement:
While carp and salmon have lower scores than pigs and chickens, we suspect that’s largely due to a lack of research.
Is this a species-specific suspicion? Or does a lower amount of (high-quality) research on a species generally reduce your welfare range estimate? On average I’d have expected the welfare range estimate to stay the same with increasing evidence, but the level of certainty about the estimate to increase.
If you have reason to believe that the existing research is systematically biased in a way that would lead to higher welfare range estimates with more research, do you account for this bias in your estimates?
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.
Love this type of research, thank you very much for doing it!
I’m confused about the following statement:
Is this a species-specific suspicion? Or does a lower amount of (high-quality) research on a species generally reduce your welfare range estimate?
On average I’d have expected the welfare range estimate to stay the same with increasing evidence, but the level of certainty about the estimate to increase.
If you have reason to believe that the existing research is systematically biased in a way that would lead to higher welfare range estimates with more research, do you account for this bias in your estimates?
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.