You don’t know what my intuitions about bees were before we began, nor what they are now. FWIW, I came into this project basically inclined to think of insects as little robots. Reading about them changed what I think I should say. However, my intuitions probably haven’t shifted that much. But as we’ve seen, I place less weight on my intuitions here than you do.
You’re ignoring what we say in the post: our actual views, which are informed by the models but not directly determined by them, are that the verts are within one OOM of humans and inverts are within 2 OOMs of the verts. The specific values are, as we indicate, just placeholders.
We tried to develop a methodology that makes our estimates depend on the state of empirical knowledge. I’ll be the first to point out its limitations. If we’re listing criticisms, I’m worried about things like generalizing within taxonomic categories, the difficulty of scoring individual proxies, and the problem of handling missing data—not “hiding our intuitions behind a complex model.”
I want to do better going forward. This is the first step in an iterative process. If you have concrete suggestions about how to improve the methodology, please let me know.
Hi LGS. A few quick points:
You don’t know what my intuitions about bees were before we began, nor what they are now. FWIW, I came into this project basically inclined to think of insects as little robots. Reading about them changed what I think I should say. However, my intuitions probably haven’t shifted that much. But as we’ve seen, I place less weight on my intuitions here than you do.
You’re ignoring what we say in the post: our actual views, which are informed by the models but not directly determined by them, are that the verts are within one OOM of humans and inverts are within 2 OOMs of the verts. The specific values are, as we indicate, just placeholders.
We tried to develop a methodology that makes our estimates depend on the state of empirical knowledge. I’ll be the first to point out its limitations. If we’re listing criticisms, I’m worried about things like generalizing within taxonomic categories, the difficulty of scoring individual proxies, and the problem of handling missing data—not “hiding our intuitions behind a complex model.”
I want to do better going forward. This is the first step in an iterative process. If you have concrete suggestions about how to improve the methodology, please let me know.