My assumptions differ as I used the stated average cost to reduce a year of suffering from Doing Good Better, which was, from memory, 60 cents.
As I’ve said elsewhere, this was a very quick proof of concept to get a feel for whether developing this into a website or something similar would be useful—which is why there are a lot of assumptions. But even so, with an appropriate footnote, I’m not convinced that having a lot of assumptions is a bad thing. The object is to reduce suffering, not to have a ‘down to the wire’ rigorous calculator. Given that, I’m not even convinced that biasing the results, e.g. by making it more striking, would be bad either, again with the appropriate footer. Such techniques are extremely common in the advertising space, and for good reason—they work.
As an aside, you’re right about the pigs, but the ACE calculator shows 180 chickens are also spared a life of suffering by best guess estimate, at a cost of 28 cents a chicken. As chickens are also quite intelligent, might you suggest switching the calculator to chickens?
Thanks for your feedback Mac.
My assumptions differ as I used the stated average cost to reduce a year of suffering from Doing Good Better, which was, from memory, 60 cents.
As I’ve said elsewhere, this was a very quick proof of concept to get a feel for whether developing this into a website or something similar would be useful—which is why there are a lot of assumptions. But even so, with an appropriate footnote, I’m not convinced that having a lot of assumptions is a bad thing. The object is to reduce suffering, not to have a ‘down to the wire’ rigorous calculator. Given that, I’m not even convinced that biasing the results, e.g. by making it more striking, would be bad either, again with the appropriate footer. Such techniques are extremely common in the advertising space, and for good reason—they work.
As an aside, you’re right about the pigs, but the ACE calculator shows 180 chickens are also spared a life of suffering by best guess estimate, at a cost of 28 cents a chicken. As chickens are also quite intelligent, might you suggest switching the calculator to chickens?