From this post, it seems like you’re trying to calculate historic cost-effectiveness and rate charities exclusively on that (since you haven’t published an evaluation of an animal charity yet I could be wrong here though)
This is not what we are trying to do. We simply critiqued the way that ACE calculated historic cost-effectiveness, and how ACE gave Legal Impact for Chickens a relatively high historic cost-effectiveness rating despite have no historic success.
My understanding of what ACE is trying to do with its evaluations as a whole is identify where marginal dollars might be most useful for animal advocacy, and move money from less effective opportunities to those.
ACE does 2 separate analyses for past cost-effectiveness, and room for future funding. For example, those two sections in ACE’s review of LIC are:
Cost Effectiveness: How much has Legal Impact for Chickens achieved through their programs?
Room For More Funding: How much additional money can Legal Impact for Chickens effectively use in the next two years?
Our review focuses on ACE’s Cost-Effectiveness analysis, not on their Room For More Funding analysis. In the future, we may evaluate ACE’s Room For More Funding Analysis, but that is not what our review focused on. We wanted to keep our review short enough that people could read it without a huge time investment, so we could not include an assessment of every single part of ACE’s evaluation process in our review.
It is also less reasonable to hold ACE accountable for their Room For More Funding analysis, since this is inherently more subjective and difficult to do. It is far easier for ACE (or any charity evaluator) to analyze historic cost-effectiveness than to analyze future cost-effectiveness. However, I would like to pose a question to you: Given the ACE often gives charities a worse historic cost-effectiveness rating for spending less money to achieve the exact same outcomes (see Problem 1), how confident do you feel in ACE’s ability to analyze future cost-effectiveness?
My understanding is ACE has tried to do something that’s just cost-effectiveness analysis in the past (they used to give probability distributions for how many animals were helped, for example).
ACE responded to this thread acknowledging that the problems listed in our review needed to be addressed, and that they changed their methodology (to a cost-effectiveness calculation of simply impact divided by cost) to do so:
This is not what we are trying to do. We simply critiqued the way that ACE calculated historic cost-effectiveness, and how ACE gave Legal Impact for Chickens a relatively high historic cost-effectiveness rating despite have no historic success.
FWIW this seems great—excited to see more comprehensive evaluations. Yeah, I agree with many of your comments here on the granular level — it seems you found something that is a potential issue for how ACE does (or did) some aspects of their evaluations, and publishing that is great! I think we just disagree on how important it is?
By the way, I’m ending further engagement on this (though feel free to leave a response if useful!) just because I already find the EA Forum distracting from other work, and don’t have time this week to think about this more. Appreciate you going through everything with me!
Thank you for your response!
This is not what we are trying to do. We simply critiqued the way that ACE calculated historic cost-effectiveness, and how ACE gave Legal Impact for Chickens a relatively high historic cost-effectiveness rating despite have no historic success.
ACE does 2 separate analyses for past cost-effectiveness, and room for future funding. For example, those two sections in ACE’s review of LIC are:
Cost Effectiveness: How much has Legal Impact for Chickens achieved through their programs?
Room For More Funding: How much additional money can Legal Impact for Chickens effectively use in the next two years?
Our review focuses on ACE’s Cost-Effectiveness analysis, not on their Room For More Funding analysis. In the future, we may evaluate ACE’s Room For More Funding Analysis, but that is not what our review focused on. We wanted to keep our review short enough that people could read it without a huge time investment, so we could not include an assessment of every single part of ACE’s evaluation process in our review.
It is also less reasonable to hold ACE accountable for their Room For More Funding analysis, since this is inherently more subjective and difficult to do. It is far easier for ACE (or any charity evaluator) to analyze historic cost-effectiveness than to analyze future cost-effectiveness. However, I would like to pose a question to you: Given the ACE often gives charities a worse historic cost-effectiveness rating for spending less money to achieve the exact same outcomes (see Problem 1), how confident do you feel in ACE’s ability to analyze future cost-effectiveness?
ACE responded to this thread acknowledging that the problems listed in our review needed to be addressed, and that they changed their methodology (to a cost-effectiveness calculation of simply impact divided by cost) to do so:
FWIW this seems great—excited to see more comprehensive evaluations. Yeah, I agree with many of your comments here on the granular level — it seems you found something that is a potential issue for how ACE does (or did) some aspects of their evaluations, and publishing that is great! I think we just disagree on how important it is?
By the way, I’m ending further engagement on this (though feel free to leave a response if useful!) just because I already find the EA Forum distracting from other work, and don’t have time this week to think about this more. Appreciate you going through everything with me!
No problem. Thank you for your replies!