Hey Steven, I think it’s great that you are looking into animal charities and it looks like you have done some good initial research here :)
There are a couple of points that I imagine many people would want to challenge, especially around invertebrate and wild animal welfare. If you don’t mind writing it out, I imagine your thoughts on factoring in uncertainty in your decision-making (i.e., on low-probability, enormous impact scenarios such as in invertebrate welfare) and your thoughts on aggregating welfare among individuals (i.e., on scenarios where orders of magnitudes more animals are affected, but each to a smaller degree such as in invertebrate welfare and in wild animal welfare) would provide a good base for these discussions to happen.
I think these are important discussions in this context specifically, because if you take neglected animals such as invertebrates and wild animals into account, you may want to explore the EA Animal Welfare Fund or ACE’s Movement Grant instead of or in addition to ACE’s Recommended Charities. I also want to flag that Faunalytics’ research shouldn’t really be boiled down to “statistics”, but I imagine your stance on New Roots Institute (i.e., helping animals directly > education/one-step-removed?) applies here too.
All of that being said, based on your expressed views, I think you will find Sinergia Animal to demonstrate the best numbers yet.
Lastly, you may find this perspective from ACE worth engaging with, specifically their perspective on ranking charities within recommended charities:
”Update the decision-making process so that it directly compares all recommended charities on marginal cost-effectiveness. Our basis for deciding whether to add a Recommended Charity is whether we think it would lead to more animals being helped on the margin (compared to having a smaller number of Recommended Charities), which is conceptually different from ranking charities. Given the types of uncertainty currently faced by the animal advocacy movement when it comes to calculating cost-effectiveness, we decide whether a charity should be recommended based on a range of decision criteria rather than scoring and ranking charities based on our sense of their relative marginal cost-effectiveness. In the future, if we had sufficiently robust evidence to form reliable cost-effectiveness estimates, including evidence or good proxies for speculative work with complex long-term theories of change, it’s possible we would move more toward the kind of ranking approach that GWWC suggests. Additionally, we consider relative cost-effectiveness during each Recommended Charity Fund distribution, where we adjust the size of each grant depending on the most up-to-date plans that charities share with us.” [emphasis added]
Thank you! I will check out the sites you recommended. Thank you for your insights into the wild animal issue, and I will look more into how the magnitude of the decisions involving wild animals (as opposed to those which are factory farmed).
Hey Steven, I think it’s great that you are looking into animal charities and it looks like you have done some good initial research here :)
There are a couple of points that I imagine many people would want to challenge, especially around invertebrate and wild animal welfare. If you don’t mind writing it out, I imagine your thoughts on factoring in uncertainty in your decision-making (i.e., on low-probability, enormous impact scenarios such as in invertebrate welfare) and your thoughts on aggregating welfare among individuals (i.e., on scenarios where orders of magnitudes more animals are affected, but each to a smaller degree such as in invertebrate welfare and in wild animal welfare) would provide a good base for these discussions to happen.
I think these are important discussions in this context specifically, because if you take neglected animals such as invertebrates and wild animals into account, you may want to explore the EA Animal Welfare Fund or ACE’s Movement Grant instead of or in addition to ACE’s Recommended Charities. I also want to flag that Faunalytics’ research shouldn’t really be boiled down to “statistics”, but I imagine your stance on New Roots Institute (i.e., helping animals directly > education/one-step-removed?) applies here too.
All of that being said, based on your expressed views, I think you will find Sinergia Animal to demonstrate the best numbers yet.
Lastly, you may find this perspective from ACE worth engaging with, specifically their perspective on ranking charities within recommended charities:
”Update the decision-making process so that it directly compares all recommended charities on marginal cost-effectiveness. Our basis for deciding whether to add a Recommended Charity is whether we think it would lead to more animals being helped on the margin (compared to having a smaller number of Recommended Charities), which is conceptually different from ranking charities. Given the types of uncertainty currently faced by the animal advocacy movement when it comes to calculating cost-effectiveness, we decide whether a charity should be recommended based on a range of decision criteria rather than scoring and ranking charities based on our sense of their relative marginal cost-effectiveness. In the future, if we had sufficiently robust evidence to form reliable cost-effectiveness estimates, including evidence or good proxies for speculative work with complex long-term theories of change, it’s possible we would move more toward the kind of ranking approach that GWWC suggests. Additionally, we consider relative cost-effectiveness during each Recommended Charity Fund distribution, where we adjust the size of each grant depending on the most up-to-date plans that charities share with us.” [emphasis added]
Thank you! I will check out the sites you recommended. Thank you for your insights into the wild animal issue, and I will look more into how the magnitude of the decisions involving wild animals (as opposed to those which are factory farmed).