Thanks for this post, I was also struggling with how scattered the numbers seemed to be despite many shared assumptions. One thing I would add:
Another thing I want to emphasise: this is an estimate of past performance of the entire animal rights movement. It is not an estimate of the future cost effectiveness of campaigns done by EA in particular. They are not accounting for tractableness, neglectedness, etc of future donations....
In the RP report, they accounted for this probable drop in effectiveness by dropping the effectiveness by a range of 20%-60%. This number is not backed up by any source: it appears to be a guesstimate based on the pros and cons listed by Saulius. Hence there is signifcant room for disagreement here.
If we take Sallius’s estimate of 42 chickens affected per dollar, and discount it by 40%, we get a median of 42*0.6 = 25.2 chickens affected per dollar.
Last year Open Phil stated that their forward-looking estimate was 5x lower than Saulius’ backward-looking estimate. This is the type of ‘narrow’ question I default defer to Open Phil on, and so I would drop your final figures by a factor of 3, going from 60% of Saulius to 20% of Saulius.
Thanks for this post, I was also struggling with how scattered the numbers seemed to be despite many shared assumptions. One thing I would add:
Last year Open Phil stated that their forward-looking estimate was 5x lower than Saulius’ backward-looking estimate. This is the type of ‘narrow’ question I default defer to Open Phil on, and so I would drop your final figures by a factor of 3, going from 60% of Saulius to 20% of Saulius.