For what it’s worth, I don’t specifically think our research for estimating cost-effectiveness of corporate chicken welfare work is more reliable/less biased than GiveWell’s research overall. I’d say
GiveWell makes prospective marginal cost-effectiveness estimates and those estimates are more reliable for prospective marginal cost-effectiveness (what we care about when planning donations and grants) than any of our animal welfare cost-effectiveness estimates, because GiveWell’s are based on stronger evidence about the kinds of interventions used (RCTs and meta-analyses of them vs observational studies, fact checking, informal investigation) and more carefully adjusted for future marginal work.
EAAs have made retrospective average cost-effectiveness estimates for corporate chicken welfare work. It’s hard to compare their reliability (for the times and contexts studied) to that of using GiveWell’s prospective estimates + M&E for past impact.
GiveWell only pretty indirectly tracks outcomes that matter morally, and could fail to adequately adjust RCT estimates, by making wrong assumptions or missing differences from the contexts of the RCTs. As far as I know, GiveWell isn’t trying to verify the impacts of AMF or MC on the basis of measured malaria cases or deaths, which are the outcomes we actually care about, or at least are close to the measures of welfare we care about.
For corporate chicken welfare work, we more directly track outcomes of interest of the work being done (cage-free eggs/hens, not welfare directly) and use this information to track our impacts more directly. This is both in the studies themselves, which reflect the work of the charities we’ve actually been supporting (unlike RCTs for most GiveWell recommendations, I’d guess), and more informally just tracking commitments and progress on them, and the achievements of specific orgs. We make assumptions to estimate causal effects, and those could be off.
And prospective marginal cost-effectiveness is more decision-relevant than retrospective cost-effectiveness, to guide donations and grants, which further favours GiveWell.
For what it’s worth, I don’t specifically think our research for estimating cost-effectiveness of corporate chicken welfare work is more reliable/less biased than GiveWell’s research overall. I’d say
GiveWell makes prospective marginal cost-effectiveness estimates and those estimates are more reliable for prospective marginal cost-effectiveness (what we care about when planning donations and grants) than any of our animal welfare cost-effectiveness estimates, because GiveWell’s are based on stronger evidence about the kinds of interventions used (RCTs and meta-analyses of them vs observational studies, fact checking, informal investigation) and more carefully adjusted for future marginal work.
EAAs have made retrospective average cost-effectiveness estimates for corporate chicken welfare work. It’s hard to compare their reliability (for the times and contexts studied) to that of using GiveWell’s prospective estimates + M&E for past impact.
GiveWell only pretty indirectly tracks outcomes that matter morally, and could fail to adequately adjust RCT estimates, by making wrong assumptions or missing differences from the contexts of the RCTs. As far as I know, GiveWell isn’t trying to verify the impacts of AMF or MC on the basis of measured malaria cases or deaths, which are the outcomes we actually care about, or at least are close to the measures of welfare we care about.
For corporate chicken welfare work, we more directly track outcomes of interest of the work being done (cage-free eggs/hens, not welfare directly) and use this information to track our impacts more directly. This is both in the studies themselves, which reflect the work of the charities we’ve actually been supporting (unlike RCTs for most GiveWell recommendations, I’d guess), and more informally just tracking commitments and progress on them, and the achievements of specific orgs. We make assumptions to estimate causal effects, and those could be off.
And prospective marginal cost-effectiveness is more decision-relevant than retrospective cost-effectiveness, to guide donations and grants, which further favours GiveWell.