All of ToniA's Comments + Replies

Hi Jc,

1- Yes, our criteria are different from GiveWell’s. As John alluded to in his original post, our work is quite different from GiveWell’s in a number of ways. For one thing, there is generally much less evidence available about the cost-effectiveness of animal advocacy interventions than about the cost-effectiveness of direct health interventions. As a result, our models of average cost-effectiveness are much less certain than GiveWell’s, which is one reason why we rely more heavily on other indicators of marginal cost-effectiveness. It’s possible tha... (read more)

Hi Avi,

Thanks for your comment!

I think you’re right that some corporations do name organizations in their press releases, and it seems more likely that groups will be named if they are using a more collaborative approach. For what it's worth, in the paragraph you quoted, I now think that I anchored too heavily on my impression that groups such as THL, Mercy For Animals, and Animal Equality are quite rarely (if ever) named in the news or press releases associated with the welfare policy statements, or in the welfare policy statements themselves. As the ma... (read more)

Hi John!

1- Sure, happy to discuss this further. In the example we gave in footnote 3, we only used the proportional expenditure (PE) to calculate the weighting of each program’s “animal years averted” (AYA) estimate (i.e., weighting for AYA_1 = PE_1/Sum(PE_modelled)). So this gives a weighting that we apply to each AYA estimate, and is independent from the AYA estimate itself. Stopping here is not ideal, however it is not as straightforward to use a similar method for the AYA estimates, due to their distributions.

Including the mean values of the AYA estima... (read more)

Hi Adom,

Thanks for your post, and no worries about asking questions we’ve answered elsewhere; we have a lot of research on our website, so we don’t expect anyone to know about all of it!

When I said that we consider each criterion to be an indication of a charity's marginal cost-effectiveness “independently” of the charity's average cost-effectiveness, I meant that—regardless of whether the charity has a high average cost-effectiveness or not—we still consider our six other criteria to be indications of marginal cost-effectiveness. There’s no one or two (or... (read more)

Hi Jamie,

Thanks for those thoughts. I agree that there’s room for more depth in the literature review portion of our intervention reports. We’ve prioritized breadth over depth in our intervention research so far. That’s because there’s usually no existing survey of the literature on a given intervention, and beginning with a survey helps us identify the areas that we’d like to explore more in depth. (We usually identify “questions for further research” at the end of our reports.) I agree that a review of the literature on social movement impact theory woul... (read more)

Hi Elizabeth,

Good question! We discuss how we make and use our CEEs on this page: https://animalcharityevaluators.org/research/methodology/our-use-of-cost-effectiveness-estimates/#2

Thanks, John! I've posted a response on behalf of ACE here: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1sq/response_to_john_halstead/.

Ah, good to know. Thanks!

Hi, I’m ACE’s new research director. Help give me karma to post on the forum!