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.

I don’t really have a strong view about LIC - as I’ve mentioned elsewhere in the comments, I’m skeptical in general that very EA donors should give to farmed vertebrate welfare issues in the near future. But I don’t find this level of evidence particularly compelling on its own. I think I feel confused about the example you’re giving because it isn’t about hypothetical cost-effectiveness, it’s about historic cost-effectiveness, where what matters are the counterfactuals.

I broadly think the critique is interesting, and again, seems like probably an issue with the methodology, but on its own doesn’t seem like reason to think that ACE isn’t identifying good donation opportunities, because things besides cost-effectiveness also matter here.

From this post, it seems like you’re trying to calculate historic cost-effectiveness and rate charities exclusively on that (since you haven’t published an evaluation of an animal charity yet I could be wrong here though). My understanding of what ACE is trying to do with its evaluations as a whole is identify where marginal dollars might be most useful for animal advocacy, and move money from less effective opportunities to those. Cost-effectiveness might be one component of that, but is far from the only one (e.g. intervention scalability might matter, having a diversity of types of opportunities to appeal to different donors, etc.). It’s pretty easy to imagine scenarios where you wouldn’t prefer to only look at cost-effectiveness of individual charities when making recommendation, even if that’s what matters in the end. It’s also easy to imagine scenarios where recommending less effective opportunities leads to better outcomes to animals - maybe installing shrimp stunners is super effective, but only some donors will give to it. Maybe it can only scale to a few M per year but you influence more money than that. Depending on your circumstances, a lot more than cost-effectiveness of specific interventions matters for making the most effective recommendations.

My understanding is also that ACE doesn’t see EAs as its primary audience (but I’m less certain about this). This is a reason I’m excited about your project - seems nice to have “very EA” evaluations of charities in addition to ACE’s. But, I also imagine it would be hard to get charities to participate in your evaluation process if you don’t run the evaluations by them in advance, which could make it hard for you to get information to do what you’re trying to do, unless you rely on the information ACE collects, which then puts you in an awkward position of making a strong argument against an organization you might need to conduct evaluations.

My understanding is ACE has tried to do something that’s just cost-effectiveness analysis in the past (they used to give probability distributions for how many animals were helped, for example). But it’s really difficult to do confidently for animal issues, and that’s part of the reason it’s only a portion of the whole picture (along with other factors like I mention above).

…we have reviewed 5 of ACE's "Top 11 Animal Charities to Donate to in 2024" and only one of them (Shrimp Welfare Project) appears to be an effective charity for helping animals. ACE's poor evaluation process leads to ineffective charities receiving recommendations, and many animals are suffering as a result.

I understand these are forthcoming, but no evidence is provided for this entire part - part of the reason I pushed on this is I think seeing your alternative evaluations would be very helpful for interpreting the strength of the critique of ACE. Without seeing them, I can’t evaluate the latter half of the quoted text. And in my eyes, if these are similar to the evaluation here of LIC, it’s pretty far from demonstrating that ineffective charities are receiving recommendations, etc. And, given that you’ve only evaluated <50% of their charities so far, it seems preemptive to make the overall claim. I think the overall claim is very possibly true, but again, I think to make the argument that animals are directly suffering as a result of this, you’d have to demonstrate that those charities are worse than other donation options, that donors would give to the better options, etc.

Thanks! My wording in the above message was imprecise, but I mean something like farmed vertebrates. SWP is probably among the two most important things to fund, in my opinion.

Basically I think the size of good opportunities in farmed animal advocacy is smaller than OpenPhil's grantmaking budget and there are few scalable interventions, though I don't think I want to go into most the reasons publicly. Given that they've stopped funding many of what I believe are more cost-effective projects, and that EA donors are basically the only people willing to fund those, EA donors should be mostly inclined to fund things OpenPhil can't fund instead.

So some combination of 1+2 (for farmed vertebrates) + other factors