There is a fixed pool of charities that ACE will evaluate, which consists of 10-15 charities.
While I think this is a good simplifying assumption, it’s incorrect and potentially makes a dramatic change to your model. The reason is that I think this assumption is what implies that “ACE will likely identify pretty-good charities very early on, and additional rounds do not lead to much change”.
However, I’d view ACE as potentially still building research capacity to eventually evaluate more speculative and harder to understand options (such as the recent recommendation of The Good Food Institute) that previously could not be evaluated and may end up being cost-effective.
I also think this capacity will produce lumpy breakthroughs in evaluating cost-effectiveness and refining accuracy. Many of these breakthroughs have not happened yet and I could see them potentially dramatically changing the top charity list for ACE.
I don’t have strong views on whether ACE is the best place for donations, all charities and causes considered, but I do strongly think that assuming ACE has already hit diminishing returns to research investment is a mistake and I do weakly think that building more research capacity and direct research are the most important investments in the animal-interested EA space.
(Disclaimer: I’m on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators, but only speak for myself here. I do not speak for ACE and I may have (and often do have) differing opinions than the ACE consensus.)
While I think this is a good simplifying assumption, it’s incorrect and potentially makes a dramatic change to your model. The reason is that I think this assumption is what implies that “ACE will likely identify pretty-good charities very early on, and additional rounds do not lead to much change”.
However, I’d view ACE as potentially still building research capacity to eventually evaluate more speculative and harder to understand options (such as the recent recommendation of The Good Food Institute) that previously could not be evaluated and may end up being cost-effective.
I also think this capacity will produce lumpy breakthroughs in evaluating cost-effectiveness and refining accuracy. Many of these breakthroughs have not happened yet and I could see them potentially dramatically changing the top charity list for ACE.
I don’t have strong views on whether ACE is the best place for donations, all charities and causes considered, but I do strongly think that assuming ACE has already hit diminishing returns to research investment is a mistake and I do weakly think that building more research capacity and direct research are the most important investments in the animal-interested EA space.
(Disclaimer: I’m on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators, but only speak for myself here. I do not speak for ACE and I may have (and often do have) differing opinions than the ACE consensus.)