those are both good questions. i tried to find base rates with a cursory search but came up empty-handed. maybe i just didn’t use the right search terms, though. but even if the numbers here are the same as the base rate, i would argue that’s still pretty bad, because the costs involved in animal testing are higher. i think it makes sense to judge animal-testing research more stringently than other research. though base rates would be useful to see e.g. how difficult it would be to improve methodologies and reduce the amount of unproductive research.
one thing i didn’t make clear in the post but which i now realise i should’ve is that an experiment not getting published due to lack of statistical significance (or more precisely rejection of the null hypothesis) doesn’t mean that research wasn’t valuable—it could have been rejected due to publication bias.
those are both good questions. i tried to find base rates with a cursory search but came up empty-handed. maybe i just didn’t use the right search terms, though. but even if the numbers here are the same as the base rate, i would argue that’s still pretty bad, because the costs involved in animal testing are higher. i think it makes sense to judge animal-testing research more stringently than other research. though base rates would be useful to see e.g. how difficult it would be to improve methodologies and reduce the amount of unproductive research.
one thing i didn’t make clear in the post but which i now realise i should’ve is that an experiment not getting published due to lack of statistical significance (or more precisely rejection of the null hypothesis) doesn’t mean that research wasn’t valuable—it could have been rejected due to publication bias.