I think if you’re primarily trying to model effects on extinction risk, then doing everything via “proportional increase in population” and nowhere directly analysing extinction risk, seems like a weirdly indirect way to do it—and leaves me with a bunch of questions about whether that’s really the best way to do it.
if you’re primarily trying to model effects on extinction risk
I am not necessarily trying to do this. I intended to model the overall effect of saving lives, and I have the intuition that saving a life in a catastrophe (period over which there is a large reduction in population) conditional on it happening is more valuable than saving a life in normal times, so I assumed the value of saving a life increases with the severity of the catastrophe. One can assume preventing extinction is specially important by selecting a higher value for ϵB (“the elasticity of the benefits [of saving a life] with respect to the ratio between the initial and final population”).
Sorry, I understood that you primarily weren’t trying to model effects on extinction risk. But I understood you to be suggesting that this methodology might be appropriate for what we were doing in that paper—which was primarily modelling effects on extinction risk.
I think if you’re primarily trying to model effects on extinction risk, then doing everything via “proportional increase in population” and nowhere directly analysing extinction risk, seems like a weirdly indirect way to do it—and leaves me with a bunch of questions about whether that’s really the best way to do it.
I am not necessarily trying to do this. I intended to model the overall effect of saving lives, and I have the intuition that saving a life in a catastrophe (period over which there is a large reduction in population) conditional on it happening is more valuable than saving a life in normal times, so I assumed the value of saving a life increases with the severity of the catastrophe. One can assume preventing extinction is specially important by selecting a higher value for ϵB (“the elasticity of the benefits [of saving a life] with respect to the ratio between the initial and final population”).
Sorry, I understood that you primarily weren’t trying to model effects on extinction risk. But I understood you to be suggesting that this methodology might be appropriate for what we were doing in that paper—which was primarily modelling effects on extinction risk.