@Henry Howard🔸argues that much of the scholarship that animal welfare estimates are based on is so wide that that it doesn’t make clear conclusions:
Unfortunately these ranges have such wide confidence intervals that, putting aside the question of whether the methodology and ranges are even valid, it doesn’t seem to get us any closer to doing the necessary cost-benefit analyses.
My response to this is that we can always take medians. And to the extent that the medians multiplied by the number of animals suggest this is a very large problem, the burden is on those who disagree to push the estimates down.
There isn’t some rule which says that extremely wide confidence intervals can be ignored. If anything extremely wide confidence intervals ought to be inspected more closely because the value inside them can take a lot of different values.
I just sort of think this argumend doesn’t hold water for me.
Argument: Approximations are too approximate.
@Henry Howard🔸 argues that much of the scholarship that animal welfare estimates are based on is so wide that that it doesn’t make clear conclusions:
My response to this is that we can always take medians. And to the extent that the medians multiplied by the number of animals suggest this is a very large problem, the burden is on those who disagree to push the estimates down.
There isn’t some rule which says that extremely wide confidence intervals can be ignored. If anything extremely wide confidence intervals ought to be inspected more closely because the value inside them can take a lot of different values.
I just sort of think this argumend doesn’t hold water for me.