Nice! And yeah, I shouldn't have said downstream. I mean something like, (almost) every intervention has wild animal welfare considerations (because many things end up impacting wild animals), so if you buy that wild animal welfare matters, the complexity of solving WAW problems isn't just a problem for WAI — it's a problem for everyone.

I have seen this before, and wondered if it is conflation with Humane Society of the United States (which is often called the Humane Society). Also, many local animal shelters are named "Humane Society". I'd guess this phrase would have very high recognition in the US.

Thanks! That's useful and makes sense! Appreciate the quick response

Minor question - I noticed that the website states for the climate fund that the same donation will help a lot more animals than the impact fund (over 2x as many - and mostly driven by chickens and pigs). I know the numbers are likely low confidence, but just curious how you're thinking about those, as to me it was unintuitive to have one labelled "impact fund" that straightforwardly looks worse on animal impacts than the climate fund (and also worse on the climate side!). I didn't quite understand why this was happening from looking at the calculations page (though from the charities in each, I definitely have the sense that the impact fund is better for animals!)

I voted for Wild Animal Initiative, followed by Shrimp Welfare Project and Arthropoda Foundation (I have COIs with WAI and Arthropoda).

• All three cannot be funded by OpenPhil/GVF currently, despite WAI/SWP being heavily funded previously by them.
• I think that wild animal welfare is the single most important animal welfare issue, and it remains incredibly neglected, with just WAI working on it exclusively.
  • Despite this challenge, WAI seems to have made a ton of progress on building the scientific knowledge needed to actually make progress on these issues.
  • Since founding and leaving WAI, I've just become increasingly optimistic about there being a not-too-long-term pathway to robust interventions to help wild animals, and to wild animal welfare going moderately mainstream within conservation biology/ecology.
• Wild animal welfare is downstream from ~every other cause area. If you think it is a problem, but that we can't do anything about it because the issue is so complicated, then the same is true of the wild animal welfare impacts of basically all other interventions EAs pursue. This seems like a huge issue for knowing the impact of our work. No one is working on this except WAI, and no other issues seem to cut across all causes the way wild animal welfare does.
• SWP seems like they are implementing the most cost-effective animal welfare intervention that is remotely scalable right now.
• In general, I favor funding research, because historically OpenPhil has been far more likely to fund research than other funders, and it is pretty hard for research-focused organizations to compete with intervention-focused organizations in the animal funding scene, despite lots of interventions being downstream from research. Since Arthropoda also does scientific field building / research funding, I added it to my list.

This is starting to feel pretty bad faith, so I'm actually going to stop engaging. 

(Responding because this is inaccurate): My claim in the comment above was that you haven't provided any evidence that:

• 5 / 11 (or more) ACE top charities are not effective
• That animals are suffering as a result of ACE recommendations

Which remains the case — I look forward to you producing it. 

Wait, those are related to each other though - if we haven't seen the full impact of their previous actions, we haven't yet seen their historical cost-effectiveness in full! Also, you cite these as reasons the project should be dismissed in your post - you have a section literally called "Legal Impact for Chickens Did Not Achieve Any Favorable Legal Outcomes, Yet ACE Rated Them a Top Charity" which reads to me that you believe that it is bad they were rated a Top Charity, and make these same arguments (and no others) in the section, suggesting that you think this evidence means they should be dismissed.

This is not what we are trying to do. We simply critiqued the way that ACE calculated historic cost-effectiveness, and how ACE gave Legal Impact for Chickens a relatively high historic cost-effectiveness rating despite have no historic success. 

FWIW this seems great - excited to see more comprehensive evaluations. Yeah, I agree with many of your comments here on the granular level — it seems you found something that is a potential issue for how ACE does (or did) some aspects of their evaluations, and publishing that is great! I think we just disagree on how important it is?

By the way, I'm ending further engagement on this (though feel free to leave a response if useful!) just because I already find the EA Forum distracting from other work, and don't have time this week to think about this more. Appreciate you going through everything with me!

I don't find that evidence particularly compelling on its own, no. Lots of projects cost more than 1M or take more than a few years to have success. I don't see why those things would be cause to dismiss a project out of hand. I don't really buy social movement theories of change for animal advocacy, but many people do, and it just seems like many social movement-y things take a long time to build momentum, and legal and research-focused projects take forever to play out. Things I'd want to look at to form a view on this (though to be clear, I plausibly agree with you!):

• How much lawsuits of this type typically cost
• What the base rate for success is for this kind of work
• How long this kind of work typically takes to get traction
• Has anyone else tried similar work on misleading labelling or whatever? Was it effective or not?
• Has LIC's work inspired other lawsuits, as ACE reported might be a positive side effect?
   

I don't think we disagree that much here, except how much these things matter — I don't really care about ACE's ability to analyze cost-effectiveness outside broad strokes because I think the primary benefits of organizations like ACE is shifting money to more cost-effective things within the animal space, which I do believe ACE does. I also don't mind ACE endorsing speculative bets that don't pay off — I think there are many things that were worth paying for in expectation that don't end up helping any animals, and will continue to be, because we don't really know very many effective ways to help animals so the information value of trying new things is high.

But to answer your question specifically, I'd be very skeptical of anyone's numbers on future cost-effectiveness, ACE's or yours or my own, because I think this is an issue that has historically been extremely difficult to estimate cost-effectiveness for. I'm not convinced that's the right way to approach identifying effective animal interventions, in part because it is so hard to do well. I don't really think ACE is making cost-effectiveness estimates here though - it seems much more like trying to get a rough sense of relative cost-effectiveness, which, putting aside the methodological issues you've raised, seems like the right approach to me, but only a small part of the information I'd want to know where money should move in animal advocacy.