Thanks for this, Just wanted to note a misframing of the slaughterhouse ban post. You have written “found ~40% supported banning slaughterhouses or said ‘don’t know / no opinion’ to questions, highlighting a large discrepancy”-which I think is taken directly from the latest “EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary” rather than the slaughterhouse ban post. This makes it seem like 60% opposed and then 40% combined EITHER supported or had no opinion, when in fact the 2017 Sentience Institute result was 43% supported, 11% chose don’t know, 46% opposed.
I realise this misunderstanding comes from my phrasing in the summary ”(~39-43% support when including those who chose no opinion/don’t know)”
I added the “when including those who chose no opinion/don’t know” clause because Sentience Institute’s 2017 summary only reports the percentages agreeing out of those who either agreed or disagreed (47% agree with the ban, 53% disagree). But since many respondents selected “Don’t know” regarding the bans on slaughterhouses (11%), the overall percentages supporting these ban is slightly lower than their headline summary: 43% rather than 47%. In their 2020 replication, the same issue appears again when SI report a headline result of “44.8% are in favor of banning slaughterhouses” but this excludes the “don’t know”, so the actual support is 39.5%.
Sorry for causing confusion. I have now edited the original post to avoid this so it just reads “(~39-43% support).
Also you only mention the results from survey 1, the survey experiment of N=700, and I think a fairer comparison to the Sentience Institute figure is from survey 2 of 15.7% (95% CI [13%-18.8%]) support because both of these use weighting to represent the US public’s opinion and are of a larger sample size.
Apologies—I’ve fixed it so I use the 39-43% figure from SI as well as referencing survey 2 rather than survey 1 (agreed it’s much more useful as it’s larger and nationally representative).
No worries re the confusion, yeah I didn’t quite understand how it was framed in your post and thought Zoe might have the right interpretation but seems not! Thanks for amending your post and explaining though—it’s much clearer now.
Thanks for this,
Just wanted to note a misframing of the slaughterhouse ban post. You have written
“found ~40% supported banning slaughterhouses or said ‘don’t know / no opinion’ to questions, highlighting a large discrepancy”-which I think is taken directly from the latest “EA & LW Forums Weekly Summary” rather than the slaughterhouse ban post.
This makes it seem like 60% opposed and then 40% combined EITHER supported or had no opinion, when in fact the 2017 Sentience Institute result was 43% supported, 11% chose don’t know, 46% opposed.
I realise this misunderstanding comes from my phrasing in the summary
”(~39-43% support when including those who chose no opinion/don’t know)”
I added the “when including those who chose no opinion/don’t know” clause because Sentience Institute’s 2017 summary only reports the percentages agreeing out of those who either agreed or disagreed (47% agree with the ban, 53% disagree). But since many respondents selected “Don’t know” regarding the bans on slaughterhouses (11%), the overall percentages supporting these ban is slightly lower than their headline summary: 43% rather than 47%. In their 2020 replication, the same issue appears again when SI report a headline result of “44.8% are in favor of banning slaughterhouses” but this excludes the “don’t know”, so the actual support is 39.5%.
Sorry for causing confusion. I have now edited the original post to avoid this so it just reads “(~39-43% support).
Also you only mention the results from survey 1, the survey experiment of N=700, and I think a fairer comparison to the Sentience Institute figure is from survey 2 of 15.7% (95% CI [13%-18.8%]) support because both of these use weighting to represent the US public’s opinion and are of a larger sample size.
Apologies—I’ve fixed it so I use the 39-43% figure from SI as well as referencing survey 2 rather than survey 1 (agreed it’s much more useful as it’s larger and nationally representative).
No worries re the confusion, yeah I didn’t quite understand how it was framed in your post and thought Zoe might have the right interpretation but seems not! Thanks for amending your post and explaining though—it’s much clearer now.
Ah cheers, that makes sense—I’ll update in the forum summary post too.