[SEMW]

Congrats on the launch!

> We’ve found that some of the most cost-effective charities can buy one year of perfect health (a QALY) for as little as $80

Which was that? IIRC GiveWell only claim $100/QALY for the AMF - have you found a charity you believe is 20% more efficient than that, or is this just a difference in how you measure cost per qaly?

[Edit] another question -- there's recently been criticism[0] of the poor quality of data and effectiveness research in animal welfare EA, compared with human welfare EA. Would the animal welfare fund be doing things like actively commissioning new research into intervention effectiveness? Or would it be more hands-off, just limited to picking charities based on the data that's out there at the moment?

[0] https://medium.com/@harrisonnathan/the-actual-number-is-almo...

[colophonemes]

It's just that it's an estimate that hinges on a few judgement calls (e.g. whether or not to cost services that AMF receive pro bono) — we're in agreement with Givewell's estimate. For comparison, the WHO think that LLINs work out to be around ~$30/DALY and AMF run a pretty tight ship.

Given the tricky nature of cost-effectiveness estimates I don't think the numbers are hard enough that it'd be wise to talk about the difference implying anything as exact as an intervention being '20% more efficient'. It's more to get a reasonable ballpark for comparisons between other interventions.

(Also, seems there was a typo in the OP, should be DALY not QALY).

[MattHeard]

QALY and DALY are different.

http://www.qalibra.eu/tool/support/page8.cfm

[cjbprime]

.. which doesn't preclude someone having typoed one for the other, right?

[tmacaulay]

Thanks for pointing that out - AMF is indeed one of the charities that our fund will support. GiveWell staff cost-effectiveness estimates vary widely[0], you can play around with their model, put in your own parameters and then see what figures you end up with.

To answer your second point, the state of evidence in the effective animal activism community is indeed poor. Our fund is likely to support programs which have a good track record or seem like promising bets. We don't want to be limited to projects which have rigorous data to support their activities, but we will encourage new projects to test their approaches, and collect data in order to prove their impact. The Animal Welfare Fund is managed by Lewis Bollard, Farm Animal Welfare Program Officer at the Open Philanthropy Project, Lewis has made grants in the past to organizations working on corporate cage-free campaigns, and clean meat initiatives. Some of these initiatives are inherently more speculative but have high expected value. You can read more about Lewis' grant history and his reasoning behind the grants on the Animal Welfare Fund page[1]. In terms of new research, Animal Charity Evaluators has created an Animal Advocacy Research Fund[2] which funds research into social and behavioural intervention cost-effectiveness. They've made a few small grants, and are looking to scale up this year. We're excited to see the animal welfare community become more evidence-based, though we also want to make sure we fund the activities that are most likely to help animals, given what we know right now.

[0] http://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effect... [1] https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare [2] http://researchfund.animalcharityevaluators.org/