I very much agree with your decision of not recommending ACE’s RCF, and I think your evaluation was great.
Another example where we think ACE could have engaged more robustly with their CEAs is in cases where ACE did not reach estimates for Suffering-Adjusted Days (SADs) averted per dollar.
Did you have the chance to look into the pain intensities Ambitious Impact uses to calculate SADs? They are not public, but you can ask Vicky Cox for the sheet. I think they hugely underweight excruciating pain, such that interventions addressing this (like Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative) have their cost-effectiveness underestimated a lot. Feel free to ask Vicky for my comments on the pain intensities.
Nitpick. ACE’s additional funds discount for low uncertainty should be higher than 0 % (and lower than 20 %), or there is a typo in the table below?
ACE considers charities’ priorities for additional funds — in other words, how the charity would use unexpected additional funding — and assesses ‘uncertainty about effectiveness and tractability of plans’ — how likely they think each line item in the charity’s plan is to experience diminishing returns or not play out as expected under the charity’s growth plan. ACE assesses each line item in a charity’s proposed future plans on a scale from very low uncertainty to very high uncertainty, with a corresponding discount applied to the cost of the line item.
Thanks for the comment! We didn’t look deeply into the SADs framework as part of our evaluation, as we didn’t think this would have been likely to change our final decision. It is possible we will look into this more in future evaluations. I currently expect use of this framework to be substantially preferable to a status quo where there is not a set of conceptually meaningful units for comparing animal welfare interventions.
On ACE’s additional funds discounts, our understanding is that the 0% discount for low uncertainty is not a typo. ACE lists their uncertainty categories and the corresponding discounts under Criterion 2 on their evaluation criteria page.
I very much agree with your decision of not recommending ACE’s RCF, and I think your evaluation was great.
Did you have the chance to look into the pain intensities Ambitious Impact uses to calculate SADs? They are not public, but you can ask Vicky Cox for the sheet. I think they hugely underweight excruciating pain, such that interventions addressing this (like Shrimp Welfare Project’s Humane Slaughter Initiative) have their cost-effectiveness underestimated a lot. Feel free to ask Vicky for my comments on the pain intensities.
Nitpick. ACE’s additional funds discount for low uncertainty should be higher than 0 % (and lower than 20 %), or there is a typo in the table below?
Thanks for the comment! We didn’t look deeply into the SADs framework as part of our evaluation, as we didn’t think this would have been likely to change our final decision. It is possible we will look into this more in future evaluations. I currently expect use of this framework to be substantially preferable to a status quo where there is not a set of conceptually meaningful units for comparing animal welfare interventions.
On ACE’s additional funds discounts, our understanding is that the 0% discount for low uncertainty is not a typo. ACE lists their uncertainty categories and the corresponding discounts under Criterion 2 on their evaluation criteria page.