I’m involved with ACE as a board member and independent volunteer researcher, but I speak for myself. I agree with you that the leafleting complaints are legitimate—I’ve been advocating more skepticism toward the leafleting numbers for years. But I feel like it’s pretty harsh to think ACE needs to be entirely replaced.
I don’t know if it’s helpful, but I can promise you that there’s no intentional PR campaign on behalf of ACE to over-exaggerate in order to grow the movement. All I see is an overworked org with insufficient resources to double check all the content on their site.
Judging the character of the ACE staff through my interactions with them, I don’t think there was any intent to mislead on leaflets. I’d put it more as negligence arising from over-excitement from the initial studies (despite lots of methodological flaws), insufficient skepticism, and not fully thinking through how things would be interpreted (the claim that leafleting evidence is the strongest among AR is technically true). The one particular sentence, among the thousands on the site, went pretty much unnoticed until Harrison brought it up.
Thanks for the feedback, and I’m sorry that it’s harsh. I’m willing to believe that it wasn’t conscious intent at publication time at least.
But it seems quite likely to me from the outside that if they thought the numbers were underestimating they’d have fixed them a lot faster, and unless that’s not true it’s a pretty severe ethics problem. I’m sure it was a matter of “it’s an error that’s not hurting anyone because charity is good, so it isn’t very important”, or even just a generic motivation problem in volunteering to fix it, some kind of rationalisation that felt good rather than “I’m going to lie for the greater good”- the only people advocating that outright seem to be other commenters- but it’s still a pretty bad ethics issue for an evaluator to succumb to the temptation to defer an unfavourable update.
I think some of this might be that the EA community was overly aggressive in finding them and sort of treating them as the animal charity GiveWell, because EA wanted there to be one, when ACE weren’t really aiming to be that robust. A good, robust evaluator’s job should be to screen out bad studies and to examine other peoples’ enthusiasm and work out how grounded it was, with transparent handling of errors (GiveWell does updates that discuss them and such) and updating in response to new information, and from that perspective taking a severely poor study at face value and not correcting it for years, resulting in a large number of people getting wrong valuations was a pretty huge failing. Making “technically correct” but very misleading statements which we’d view poorly if they came from a company advertising itself is also very bad in an organisation whose job is basically to help you sort through everyone else’s advertisements.
Maybe the sensible thing for now is to assume that there is no animal charity evaluator that’s good enough to safely defer to, and all there are are people who may point you to papers which caveat emptor, you have to check yourself, for now.
Maybe I’m being simple about this, but I find it’s helpful to point people towards ACE because there doesn’t seem to be any other charity researchers for that cause.
Just by suggesting people donate to organisations that focus on animal farming, that seems like it can have a large impact even if it’s hard to pick between the particular organisations.
I’m involved with ACE as a board member and independent volunteer researcher, but I speak for myself. I agree with you that the leafleting complaints are legitimate—I’ve been advocating more skepticism toward the leafleting numbers for years. But I feel like it’s pretty harsh to think ACE needs to be entirely replaced.
I don’t know if it’s helpful, but I can promise you that there’s no intentional PR campaign on behalf of ACE to over-exaggerate in order to grow the movement. All I see is an overworked org with insufficient resources to double check all the content on their site.
Judging the character of the ACE staff through my interactions with them, I don’t think there was any intent to mislead on leaflets. I’d put it more as negligence arising from over-excitement from the initial studies (despite lots of methodological flaws), insufficient skepticism, and not fully thinking through how things would be interpreted (the claim that leafleting evidence is the strongest among AR is technically true). The one particular sentence, among the thousands on the site, went pretty much unnoticed until Harrison brought it up.
Thanks for the feedback, and I’m sorry that it’s harsh. I’m willing to believe that it wasn’t conscious intent at publication time at least.
But it seems quite likely to me from the outside that if they thought the numbers were underestimating they’d have fixed them a lot faster, and unless that’s not true it’s a pretty severe ethics problem. I’m sure it was a matter of “it’s an error that’s not hurting anyone because charity is good, so it isn’t very important”, or even just a generic motivation problem in volunteering to fix it, some kind of rationalisation that felt good rather than “I’m going to lie for the greater good”- the only people advocating that outright seem to be other commenters- but it’s still a pretty bad ethics issue for an evaluator to succumb to the temptation to defer an unfavourable update.
I think some of this might be that the EA community was overly aggressive in finding them and sort of treating them as the animal charity GiveWell, because EA wanted there to be one, when ACE weren’t really aiming to be that robust. A good, robust evaluator’s job should be to screen out bad studies and to examine other peoples’ enthusiasm and work out how grounded it was, with transparent handling of errors (GiveWell does updates that discuss them and such) and updating in response to new information, and from that perspective taking a severely poor study at face value and not correcting it for years, resulting in a large number of people getting wrong valuations was a pretty huge failing. Making “technically correct” but very misleading statements which we’d view poorly if they came from a company advertising itself is also very bad in an organisation whose job is basically to help you sort through everyone else’s advertisements.
Maybe the sensible thing for now is to assume that there is no animal charity evaluator that’s good enough to safely defer to, and all there are are people who may point you to papers which caveat emptor, you have to check yourself, for now.
Maybe I’m being simple about this, but I find it’s helpful to point people towards ACE because there doesn’t seem to be any other charity researchers for that cause.
Just by suggesting people donate to organisations that focus on animal farming, that seems like it can have a large impact even if it’s hard to pick between the particular organisations.