Thanks for the thoughtful feedback, Vasco—it’s very much appreciated!
To clarify a few things:
We looked at a lot of charities, and in our opinion, these three were the best. That said, we don’t want readers to donate just because we called them “top” charities. Our goal is for people to read our reviews, understand what each charity is doing, and make their own decision based on their values and priorities.
It’s possible there are large differences in cost-effectiveness between our recommendations, but we don’t know if this is true, and we also don’t have a strong intuition as to what the ranking between the three would be. We also think that trying to rank the three in terms of cost-effectiveness would be somewhat misleading (like trying to say a banana is more cost-effective than a hammer). Each solves a different problem, and which one is “better” depends heavily on what the donor values.
We only estimated total cost-effectiveness for SWP. For FWI, we cited their historical cost-effectiveness calculation, but didn’t attempt to calculate their total cost-effectiveness. It’s entirely possible FWI is the most (or least) cost-effective of the three. For example, FWI is currently attempting to use satellites to monitor water quality. If this succeeds, this could make it much cheaper to monitor water quality on fish farms. However, it remains speculative whether or not this will happen.
Thanks again for engaging with our work—we really value this kind of discussion
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback, Vasco—it’s very much appreciated!
To clarify a few things:
We looked at a lot of charities, and in our opinion, these three were the best. That said, we don’t want readers to donate just because we called them “top” charities. Our goal is for people to read our reviews, understand what each charity is doing, and make their own decision based on their values and priorities.
It’s possible there are large differences in cost-effectiveness between our recommendations, but we don’t know if this is true, and we also don’t have a strong intuition as to what the ranking between the three would be. We also think that trying to rank the three in terms of cost-effectiveness would be somewhat misleading (like trying to say a banana is more cost-effective than a hammer). Each solves a different problem, and which one is “better” depends heavily on what the donor values.
We only estimated total cost-effectiveness for SWP. For FWI, we cited their historical cost-effectiveness calculation, but didn’t attempt to calculate their total cost-effectiveness. It’s entirely possible FWI is the most (or least) cost-effective of the three. For example, FWI is currently attempting to use satellites to monitor water quality. If this succeeds, this could make it much cheaper to monitor water quality on fish farms. However, it remains speculative whether or not this will happen.
Thanks again for engaging with our work—we really value this kind of discussion