Iād refer you to an answer we gave in a previous post about how the fund has historically relied on a range of factors to judge marginal cost-effectiveness for the majority of grants and itās less often the case we have the evidence and the grant size merits a formal cost-effectiveness model. Having said that, we are currently trialing different approaches to cost-effectiveness modeling as that becomes a more standard feature of our deep evaluations (see more in our FAQs on our grantmaking process) and making explicit BOTECs a required part of evaluations. Among these, models weāre investigating include how a range of different pain category intensities weightings (as described in Grilo 2024, Ryba 2024, Schuck et al. 2024) could affect our cost-effectiveness estimates. There are reasonable grounds to put some credence in the most severe harms causing farmed animals at least as much disutility as the longest-lasting harms they experience (McAuliffe and Shriver 2023, also see Parra 2024, Ryba 2023).We make sure to note in the evaluation if the overall assessment would hinge on such a consideration (or other more philosophical/ā fundamental questions where people have reasonable disagreements) to guard against being systematically biased towards one perspective. However, in practice, this may only be a crux for a handful of grant applications (e.g., those focused on pre-slaughter stunning) Often to make a grant decision we donāt need to get a precise estimate down to the exact total hours of intensity-adjusted pain, just what would one need to believe for this grant to be at least competitive with other opportunities and does that seem like a reasonable belief to hold.
Thanks for the question!
Iād refer you to an answer we gave in a previous post about how the fund has historically relied on a range of factors to judge marginal cost-effectiveness for the majority of grants and itās less often the case we have the evidence and the grant size merits a formal cost-effectiveness model. Having said that, we are currently trialing different approaches to cost-effectiveness modeling as that becomes a more standard feature of our deep evaluations (see more in our FAQs on our grantmaking process) and making explicit BOTECs a required part of evaluations. Among these, models weāre investigating include how a range of different pain category intensities weightings (as described in Grilo 2024, Ryba 2024, Schuck et al. 2024) could affect our cost-effectiveness estimates.
There are reasonable grounds to put some credence in the most severe harms causing farmed animals at least as much disutility as the longest-lasting harms they experience (McAuliffe and Shriver 2023, also see Parra 2024, Ryba 2023).We make sure to note in the evaluation if the overall assessment would hinge on such a consideration (or other more philosophical/ā fundamental questions where people have reasonable disagreements) to guard against being systematically biased towards one perspective. However, in practice, this may only be a crux for a handful of grant applications (e.g., those focused on pre-slaughter stunning)
Often to make a grant decision we donāt need to get a precise estimate down to the exact total hours of intensity-adjusted pain, just what would one need to believe for this grant to be at least competitive with other opportunities and does that seem like a reasonable belief to hold.