Thanks Jonas. Sorry for the slow reply—I took some time off and am now travelling.
I was also uneasy about counting indirect effects of the beneficiary charities rather than CAP itself, though I’m not sure it’s for exactly the same reasons as you. The measure of benefit in the CEA was dollars counterfactually moved to the recommended charities (or equivalent), which seems to implicitly cover all consequences of those dollars. Considering indirect effects separately, with the implication that these consequences are in addition to the dollars moved, risks double-counting.
I’m not sure if that’s what you’re getting at, or if you also think we should be explicitly modelling the indirect effects of all the beneficiary charities in the CEA. I don’t think the latter is really feasible, for several reasons. For a start, we would need some universal metric for capturing both the direct and indirect consequences. The best one would probably be subjective wellbeing, but figuring out the SWB associated with a wide range of circumstances, across a large number of species, is not within the scope of an evaluation like this. Another issue is that indirect effects would likely overwhelm the direct ones, and it isn’t clear that this is appropriate given their far more speculative nature. There would probably have to be some kind of weighting system that discounts the more uncertain predictions (could be a fully Bayesian approach, or a simpler option like this), but implementing such a system itself would be very hard to do well, and perhaps less useful than highlighting them and scoring them much more subjectively as we’ve done here.
Thanks Jonas. Sorry for the slow reply—I took some time off and am now travelling.
I was also uneasy about counting indirect effects of the beneficiary charities rather than CAP itself, though I’m not sure it’s for exactly the same reasons as you. The measure of benefit in the CEA was dollars counterfactually moved to the recommended charities (or equivalent), which seems to implicitly cover all consequences of those dollars. Considering indirect effects separately, with the implication that these consequences are in addition to the dollars moved, risks double-counting.
I’m not sure if that’s what you’re getting at, or if you also think we should be explicitly modelling the indirect effects of all the beneficiary charities in the CEA. I don’t think the latter is really feasible, for several reasons. For a start, we would need some universal metric for capturing both the direct and indirect consequences. The best one would probably be subjective wellbeing, but figuring out the SWB associated with a wide range of circumstances, across a large number of species, is not within the scope of an evaluation like this. Another issue is that indirect effects would likely overwhelm the direct ones, and it isn’t clear that this is appropriate given their far more speculative nature. There would probably have to be some kind of weighting system that discounts the more uncertain predictions (could be a fully Bayesian approach, or a simpler option like this), but implementing such a system itself would be very hard to do well, and perhaps less useful than highlighting them and scoring them much more subjectively as we’ve done here.