Thank you for your great feedback and suggestions! (and sorry for not responding sooner)
I guess that one’s meaning for a “major” or “moderate” limitation is, in the end, contingent on their aspirations. If we had the standards of an organization like GiveWell, this would most certainly be a very big limitation. But quite early on we understood that we did not have the data to be able to support as strong conclusions about cost-effectiveness as GiveWell’s recommendations. Rather, our approach was: let’s do the best we can with the data we have at hand, and simply make sure that we are very clear and transparent about the limitations of our analysis. The biggest limitation of this analysis is the lack of experimental data (with only observational data available). We wanted to make sure this got the most eye-catching label. In the end we believe that what’s important is that readers of the report (or just of the executive summary) get a good sense of what conclusions are justified given our analysis and which aren’t, and that they understand what the important limitations of the analysis are. We totally agree with your arguments and the fact that past cost-effectiveness is by no means proof of future cost-effectiveness given more funding (though we do think there are reasons for cautious optimism in the case of Animals Now).
Also, thank you for the interesting suggestion for an RCT study design. This is something we have been considering in general, but haven’t thought of your exact idea. However, to approach anything like that that, we would first need the charity to have a strong motivation to get into that adventure.
Thank you!
I agree it would be nicer to report actual spared animals, rather than generic “portions of meat”. We thought of using data about the average meat diet in the relevant countries, to be able to translate portions of meat into animal lives. But we eventually decided against it, because it would introduce even more assumptions and uncertainties into our analysis, which we felt had many uncertainties already. Given the amount of uncertainty that we already have (with over an order-of-magnitude between our lower and upper bounds), we felt that giving a too detailed breakdown might be inappropriate. In the end we decided to keep it simple and use the metric we had data on, hoping that “1 to 12 portions of meat per 1 ILS” would give readers a rough sense of the potential of this program to spare animal lives.