Inspired by this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/07/us/politics/spacex-wildlife-texas.html
This market resolves to YES if clear and convincing evidence is provided to me that resolves the following hypothesis in the affirmative, before January 1, 2025.
"Let N be the number of birds killed each year by all of the cats owned by all of the employees of the New York Times. Let X be the number of birds killed each year by SpaceX rocket launches. N is greater than X."
"Clear and convincing evidence" here represents evidence that is higher than a mere preponderance, but is short of "beyond a reasonable doubt." To put it in loose probabilistic terms, anything that makes me 75% sure.
I will know it when I see it, but here's what I would expect to convince me:
A robust estimate with a clear methodology
Relies on cited sources and backed up by factual data
Where it relies on statistical estimation, those are well cited too and based on reasonable and highly probably and backed in turn by well accepted statistics
If insufficient evidence is provided to me before the expiration date, this resolves to NO.
If sufficient evidence is provided to me before the expiration date, this resolves to YES.
I will state for the record that at this time I genuinely don't know which way this is likely to resolve.
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See comments for further clarifications, but among them is this:
A "SpaceX rocket launch" is basically anything that involves a rocket that belongs to SpaceX. Typically that means firing, but it doesn't matter if it actually gets off the pad, let alone into space. Exploding counts, so does falling over without exploding or even igniting, and for the sake of clarity, basically anything that happens that kills a bird that directly involves a rocket.
Related questions
Parallel market, which only counts ENDANGERED birds:
https://manifold.markets/LarsDoucet/will-it-be-shown-that-nyt-employees-odbxbfckir
According to this survey, there are likely more than 62M cats in the USA. https://catexplore.com/number-cats-united-states/
According to this, cats in the USA kill between 1.4-4 billion birds annually. https://www.catster.com/statistics/how-many-birds-do-cats-kill-statistics/
That means that, on average, each house cat kills between 23-65 birds annually.
According to this, the NYTimes had 5,900 employees. https://www.statista.com/statistics/192894/number-of-employees-at-the-new-york-times-company/
45% of households with cats have more than one cat: https://www.saveacat.org/uploads/4/8/4/1/48413975/cat_report_-_final.pdf
Anecdotally, and empirically, liberals prefer cats: https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/7/1/28391/118945/Pets-and-Politics-Do-Liberals-and-Conservatives
According to this, 45.5M households have cats, which is 35.3% of all households. This also shows that younger people, single people, & city dwellers are both more likely for cats.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/pet-insurance/pet-ownership-statistics/
Giving a ~2x bias due to young, single, city, liberals, we can estimate that ~4000 NYTimes employees have at least one cat. 45% are likely to have more than one, with outliers having many. Estimating down, we’ll say 7500 cats.
That places the annual avian genocide due to the NYTimes at between 172,500 and 487,500.
According to this, there has only been one confirmed bird strike on a rocket:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20170012465/downloads/20170012465.pdf
I’ll leave it to others to determine if ancillary rocket impacts (accidents, &c.) can account for an additional >172,499-487,499 annual bird deaths by SpaceX.
An excellent start, thanks for contributing.
What do you think about this article that considers the number of bird murders per cat to be overstated?
https://www.alleycat.org/resources/breaking-down-the-bogus-smithsonian-catbird-study/#:~:text=The%20number%20of%20deaths%20attributable,populations%20way%20out%20of%20proportion
Further, let's go for a pessimistic upper bound on the NYT --- if you take the most pessimistic (but still plausible) estimate for each of your components, what do you arrive at?
Also, what do you say to the point commenters have raised elsewhere that urban cats might be primarily or entirely indoors and thus disproportionately lack opportunities to kill birds?
(Also as a point of clarification -- bird kills due to the offspring of a NTY employee owned cat does not count towards NYT employee cat bird kills unless the offspring are also owned by an NYT employee. So an owned cat has 100 voracious bird murdering feral kittens, those downstream bird kills don't count)
Ok, taking conservative, lower bound, values…
For cat ownership, I’ll relax it to assume only standard population values, and offer no bonus for additional cats, resulting in ~2100 cats owned by NYTimes employees.
Assuming that we ascribe weight to the argument that cats kill fewer birds than the estimate I found earlier, let’s take ½ of the lower bound of 1.4B, resulting in an average of ~12 birds annually/cat.
That results in ~25,000 birds per cat.
We can also assume that, absent an accident, only those birds proximate to the launchpad will be killed. The last accident (with the debris field mentioned by the Times) was in April of 2023, as it was more than a year ago, those deaths don’t matter. We’re also talking about death, not annoyance, so the weight given by the times for “loud and painful sounds” doesn’t count.
We would need an estimate for how many nests are present in, say, the nearby 100 acres of the launch pad. Also, nests are likely to only be distributed once a season, so additional launches are unlikely to scale linearly.
But “birds killed by cats” can also imply birds killed for cats. Many commercial cat foods contain chicken. So if the definition includes birds killed for cats, then indoor/outdoor distinctions no longer matter, and the 25,000 estimate is very low. I will assume that these birds don’t play a role in this analysis, because if they do then the answer is trivial.
So, perhaps a lower bound is 25k birds.
It is indeed a harder argument, as logically a cat that doesn’t ever encounter a bird cannot kill it.
But, not all cats, even urban ones, are indoor cats. In an urban environment, the bird kill opportunities seem like they’d be easier (pigeons on the ground rather than songbirds in trees), and not all NYTimes employees live in the core of manhattan.
Living in NYC even with a bit of outside space isn’t the urban apartment setup that I believe is the scenario envisioned by those raising the indoor/outdoor objection. But if that’s the case, then the outdoor cats are killing vastly more than a simple population average, so the population average should incorporate that distinction on balance. (IE: are most cats nationwide are indoor? If so, then the killing stats are controlled by the outdoor fraction anyway, so if that same fraction holds among NYTimes employees, then the numbers still work)
This does somewhat reduce my confidence, but I still think the number birds actually killed by SpaceX is minuscule anyway.
Also, one could extend the argument that the “cat/journalism complex” supports cats as a concept, so all bird deaths due to cats are properly laid at their feet. Without a market for house cats, the cat population would collapse mitigating the avian genocide. By owning a cat, the journalists are supporting the historical feliarchy, (this is sarcasm).
That means that, on average, each house cat kills between 23-65 birds annually.
This is the step that I find wildly implausible. The mean across all cats just isn't that relevant. Most people living in NYC do not have outdoor cats that go around and kill birds. There's no reason to think that the overall country mean translates at all to the cats owned by NYC employees. (If I were to rely on my intuition, I'd wager that in rural/suburban areas cats are much more likely to be given free range outdoors—but even if the intuition pointed in the other way it'd be a pretty dubious step in the argument).
If this step is used as a plank in some argument dunking on the NYT for hypocrisy, it will not be remotely persuasive.
Although another big issue here is that the estimates for birds killed by cats that I've seen are just... not very good studies? Maybe I've missed some better ones. But the "shockingly high" estimates that I've seen have methodology that's very iffy. I'd be curious if there's a much more modest/believable number that was calculated in a more conservative/careful way.
For the record I agree with Ziddletwix; it needs to be shown persuasively what a reasonable base kill rate for NYT employee owned cats is, and suburban and feral cats are not a good proxy for that.
If one wants to use the suburban kill rate they first have to establish what portion of NYT employees live in suburban areas
I assume you are only counting current employees, not anyone who has contributed, right?
Further clarifications:
- Species of bird is irrelevant, all that matters is number killed
- We're going to go ahead and count eggs as living birds as well, if there was reasonable cause to believe they were fertilized eggs (Elon dropping a carton of supermarket eggs in the company kitchen doesn't count)
- Birds have to be killed in the specified ways for each institution (NYTimes employees' cats, and SpaceX rockets)
- If a rogue NYTimes employee sacrifices 1,000 blue jays in a bizarre ritual to ensure the Toronto baseball team loses to the Yankees, that doesn't count
- If Elon Musk hops on a steamroller in a manic fugue state and flattens a flock of flamingos, that doesn't count either