This parameter is set to a normal distribution (which, unfortunately you can’t control) and the normal distribution doesn’t change much when you lower the lower bound. A normal distribution between 0.002 and 0.87 is about the same as a normal distribution between 0 and 0.87. (Incidentally, if the distribution were a lognormal distribution with the same range, then the average result would fall halfway between the bounds in terms of orders of magnitude. This would mean cutting the lower bound would have a significant effect. However, the effect would actually raise the effectiveness estimate because it would raise the uncertainty about the precise order of magnitude. The increase of scale outside the 90% confidence range represented by the distribution would more than make up for the lowering of the median.)
The upper end of the scale is already at ” a chicken’s suffering is worth 87% of a humans”. I’m assuming that very few people are claiming that a chickens suffering is worth more than a humans. So wouldn’t the lognormal distribution be skewed to account for this, meaning that the switch would substantially change the results?
That would require building in further assumptions, like a clip of the results at 100%. We would probably want to do that, but it struck me in thinking about this that it is easy to miss when working in a model like this. It is a bit counterintuitive that lowering the lower bound of a log normal distributions can increase the mean.
The upper end of the scale is already at ” a chicken’s suffering is worth 87% of a humans”. I’m assuming that very few people are claiming that a chickens suffering is worth more than a humans. So wouldn’t the lognormal distribution be skewed to account for this, meaning that the switch would substantially change the results?
That would require building in further assumptions, like a clip of the results at 100%. We would probably want to do that, but it struck me in thinking about this that it is easy to miss when working in a model like this. It is a bit counterintuitive that lowering the lower bound of a log normal distributions can increase the mean.