Thanks and congratulations to the RP team for your work on this. This is incredibly thorough and useful!
Having looked at the whole Moral Weight Project sequence in some detail, I have some uncertainties around the following question/objection that you list above: “Your literature review didn’t turn up many negative results. However, there are lots of proxies such that it’s implausible that many animals have them. So, your welfare range estimates are probably high.”
In your response you write that this is a good objection.
However, as I understand it, whenever proxies were unknown, you assumed these to be zero (i.e. not present). For instance, in your methodology writeup, I read: “Assigning proxies labeled “Unknown” zero probability of being present is certainly leading to underestimates of the welfare ranges and probabilities of sentience.”
Somehow I cannot square these two statements. Can you solve that seeming contradiction for me?
Thanks for your question, Moritz. We distinguish between negative results and unknowns: the former are those where there’s evidence of the absence of a trait; the latter are those where there’s no evidence. We penalized species where there was evidence of the absence of a trait; we gave zero when there was no evidence. So, not having many negative results does produce higher welfare range estimates (or, if you prefer, it just reduces the gaps between the welfare range estimates).
Thanks and congratulations to the RP team for your work on this. This is incredibly thorough and useful!
Having looked at the whole Moral Weight Project sequence in some detail, I have some uncertainties around the following question/objection that you list above:
“Your literature review didn’t turn up many negative results. However, there are lots of proxies such that it’s implausible that many animals have them. So, your welfare range estimates are probably high.”
In your response you write that this is a good objection.
However, as I understand it, whenever proxies were unknown, you assumed these to be zero (i.e. not present). For instance, in your methodology writeup, I read: “Assigning proxies labeled “Unknown” zero probability of being present is certainly leading to underestimates of the welfare ranges and probabilities of sentience.”
Somehow I cannot square these two statements. Can you solve that seeming contradiction for me?
Thanks for your question, Moritz. We distinguish between negative results and unknowns: the former are those where there’s evidence of the absence of a trait; the latter are those where there’s no evidence. We penalized species where there was evidence of the absence of a trait; we gave zero when there was no evidence. So, not having many negative results does produce higher welfare range estimates (or, if you prefer, it just reduces the gaps between the welfare range estimates).
Thanks for the explanation Bob. That absolutely makes sense! I was somehow assuming that negative results would count as zeros as well.