EA - An Evaluation of Animal Charity Evaluators by eaanonymous1234

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: An Evaluation of Animal Charity Evaluators, published by eaanonymous1234 on September 2, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Introduction Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is an effective altruism aligned organization which aims to provide information and recommendation to donors and advocates about the effectiveness of various interventions and charities. As one can expect, ACE reviews animal charities based on the effectiveness of their programs and recommends a small number of charities as “top” and “stand-out” charities. ACE also has a Movement Grants program, which provides small grants to various organizations. According to ACE, it has a budget over one million US dollars, and granted and influenced over ten million US dollars worth donations to its recommended charities and promising projects in 2021. This amount (10 million US dollars) is larger than the total amount of Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund grants in 2021. One can say that ACE is positioned to take the role of GiveWell in the Effective Altruism animal welfare cause area. It functions as an expert authority which evaluates different interventions and comes to conclusions about which ones are the most effective and which charities carry them out in the most effective way. One can also say that ACE’s role is even more significant than GiveWell, since it is not just donors who may follow its advice, it is also the animal advocates who may benefit from this expert authority by following its advice on which interventions are the most effective to help animals. In this essay I will put forward three points of criticism, which I believe can uncover certain defects that ACE has, and can help ACE to overcome them: 1) ACE’s current style of reasoning is somewhat opaque and therefore may mislead ordinary donors and advocates. 2) ACE is omitting from making substantial claims about the most effective ways to help animals, and thus failing in its primary role of evaluating the effectiveness of different interventions and charities. 3) ACE is currently underrating the effectiveness of programs which aim for animal welfare reforms relative to the effectiveness of other interventions. In the first criticism, I will argue that while ACE makes cost-effectiveness comparisons between charities which carry out similar programs (for example two charities which both engage in animal welfare campaigns), it does not comment how it is comparing charities which carry out different programs (for example, one charity which engage in animal welfare campaigns and another charity which has a vegan pledge program). I will claim that some of the terms that ACE is using such as “relative to other charities” or “highly cost-effective” is likely to be understood by ordinary donors and advocates differently than ACE’s understanding, and ACE is not providing clear context when making these statements. In the second criticism, I will show that in its current form, ACE seems to accept that almost all programs in farmed animal advocacy may be effective and does not seem to answer fundamental questions which an evaluation organization has to answer, like “which program(s) help animals the most?” or “which programs should an animal charity or an advocate prioritize?” or “which charities should a donor prioritize?”. I will argue that starting from its foundation and in its current form, ACE functions more like a hits based giving “fund”, rather than an evaluation organization, and these multiple roles make it difficult for Animal Charity Evaluators to achieve its primary role: evaluation. I will suggest that ACE should not be timid to put forward its views on the effectiveness of different programs, whatever those views are or will be. I will also have some proposals such as applying stricter and clear cut evaluation criteria, focusing ...