Executive summary: Charity evaluators like ACE should aim to assess not just their primary focus (e.g., animal welfare) but also other relevant values, to provide a fuller picture for donors and improve decision-making in effective altruism.
Key points:
The debate over ACE’s evaluation methods highlights a tension between prioritizing pure animal welfare and considering broader values like social justice or organizational culture.
Some argue that ACE should focus solely on effectiveness in animal welfare, while others defend its broader approach as useful for predicting an organization’s overall impact.
Many charity evaluators operate in silos, ignoring cross-cutting impacts; a better system would involve coordination between evaluators to assess organizations from multiple value perspectives.
An ideal system would either feature comprehensive evaluators assessing all major values or independent aggregators synthesizing findings from specialized evaluators.
While ACE’s current approach is imperfect, it is still preferable to narrowly focused evaluations that ignore externalities and broader ethical considerations.
The EA community may benefit from new initiatives or organizations dedicated to filling these evaluation gaps, though practical challenges in assessing indirect impacts remain a key obstacle.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: Charity evaluators like ACE should aim to assess not just their primary focus (e.g., animal welfare) but also other relevant values, to provide a fuller picture for donors and improve decision-making in effective altruism.
Key points:
The debate over ACE’s evaluation methods highlights a tension between prioritizing pure animal welfare and considering broader values like social justice or organizational culture.
Some argue that ACE should focus solely on effectiveness in animal welfare, while others defend its broader approach as useful for predicting an organization’s overall impact.
Many charity evaluators operate in silos, ignoring cross-cutting impacts; a better system would involve coordination between evaluators to assess organizations from multiple value perspectives.
An ideal system would either feature comprehensive evaluators assessing all major values or independent aggregators synthesizing findings from specialized evaluators.
While ACE’s current approach is imperfect, it is still preferable to narrowly focused evaluations that ignore externalities and broader ethical considerations.
The EA community may benefit from new initiatives or organizations dedicated to filling these evaluation gaps, though practical challenges in assessing indirect impacts remain a key obstacle.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.