Normalizing PH (or HP) by its variance on each theory could introduce more arbitrarily asymmetric treatment between animals, overweight theories where the variance is lowest for reasons unrelated to the probability you assign to them (e.g. on aome theories, capacity for welfare may be close to constant), and is pretty ad hoc. I would recommend looking into more general treatments of moral uncertainty instead, and just an approach like variance voting or moral parliament, applied to your whole expected value over outcomes, not PH (or HP).
As I discussed in other comments and the other links discussing the two envelopes problem, H should not be defined as constant (or independent from or uncorrelated with PH) without good argument, and on any given theory of consciousness, it seems pretty unlikely to me, since we still have substantial empirical uncertainty about human (and chicken) brains on any theory of consciousness. You can estimate the things you want to this way, but the assumptions are too strong, so you shouldn’t trust the estimates, and this is partly why you get the average chicken having greater capacity for welfare than the average human in expectation. Sometimes PH is lower than on some empirical possibilities not because P is lower on those possibilities, but because H is greater on them, but you’ve assumed this can’t be the case, so may be severely underweighting human capacity for welfare.
If you instead assumed P were constant (although this would be even more suspicious), you’d get pretty different results.
I would recommend looking into more general treatments of moral uncertainty instead, and just an approach like variance voting or moral parliament, applied to your whole expected value over outcomes, not PH (or HP).
I will do, thanks!
You can estimate the things you want to this way, but the assumptions are too strong, so you shouldn’t trust the estimates, and this is partly why you get the average chicken having greater capacity for welfare than the average human in expectation.
Note that it is possible to obtain a mean moral weight much smaller than 1 with exactly the same method, but different parameters. For example, changing the 90th percentile of moral weight of poultry birds if these are moral patients from 10 to 0.1 results in a mean moral weight of 0.02 (instead of 2). I have added to this section one speculative explanation for why estimates for the moral weight tend to be smaller.
If you instead assumed P were constant (although this would be even more suspicious), you’d get pretty different results.
I have not defined P, but I agree I could, in theory, have estimated R_PH (and S_PH) based on P = “utility of poultry living time (-pQALY/person/year)”. However, as you seem to note, this would be even more prone to error (“more suspicious”). The two methods are mathematically equivalent under my assumptions, and therefore it makes much more sense to me as a human to use QALY (instead of pQALY) as the reference unit.
Michael, once again, thank you so much for all these comments!
Normalizing PH (or HP) by its variance on each theory could introduce more arbitrarily asymmetric treatment between animals, overweight theories where the variance is lowest for reasons unrelated to the probability you assign to them (e.g. on aome theories, capacity for welfare may be close to constant), and is pretty ad hoc. I would recommend looking into more general treatments of moral uncertainty instead, and just an approach like variance voting or moral parliament, applied to your whole expected value over outcomes, not PH (or HP).
As I discussed in other comments and the other links discussing the two envelopes problem, H should not be defined as constant (or independent from or uncorrelated with PH) without good argument, and on any given theory of consciousness, it seems pretty unlikely to me, since we still have substantial empirical uncertainty about human (and chicken) brains on any theory of consciousness. You can estimate the things you want to this way, but the assumptions are too strong, so you shouldn’t trust the estimates, and this is partly why you get the average chicken having greater capacity for welfare than the average human in expectation. Sometimes PH is lower than on some empirical possibilities not because P is lower on those possibilities, but because H is greater on them, but you’ve assumed this can’t be the case, so may be severely underweighting human capacity for welfare.
If you instead assumed P were constant (although this would be even more suspicious), you’d get pretty different results.
I will do, thanks!
Note that it is possible to obtain a mean moral weight much smaller than 1 with exactly the same method, but different parameters. For example, changing the 90th percentile of moral weight of poultry birds if these are moral patients from 10 to 0.1 results in a mean moral weight of 0.02 (instead of 2). I have added to this section one speculative explanation for why estimates for the moral weight tend to be smaller.
I have not defined P, but I agree I could, in theory, have estimated R_PH (and S_PH) based on P = “utility of poultry living time (-pQALY/person/year)”. However, as you seem to note, this would be even more prone to error (“more suspicious”). The two methods are mathematically equivalent under my assumptions, and therefore it makes much more sense to me as a human to use QALY (instead of pQALY) as the reference unit.
Michael, once again, thank you so much for all these comments!