Vetted Causes was founded as an attempt to work within the effective altruism community by providing unbiased reviews of animal charities.
We were initially shocked by how flawed the metrics being advertised were, and we wanted to bring this to the community’s attention. However, we now realize this is unimportant to EA’s leaders. ACE refuses to fix their metrics, and many are in support of using inflated metrics because they lead to more donations.
Our values simply don’t align with the values EA practices. We still think that giving to effective charities is a good idea, but this can only be accomplished if leaders are willing to be honest in their evaluations. We are going to continue to pursue this idea under a new organization outside of EA.
We appreciate that there are many EAs that are honest and just want to help those in need, and we’d like to personally thank those people.
If I can put this succinctly:
Ironically, in spite of yourself, you probably did have a positive impact, because many of the charities were engaging with you in good faith and took on your feedback. You should be happy mate!
Thank you for your work improving the evaluations of Animal Charity Evaluators, and for the evaluations you have done.
I think that highly engaged animal welfare focused EAs doing evaluations on a volunteer or near-volunteer basis, and publishing them for others to learn things from, is very important in a field so starved for funding.
People may feel strongly that the work to increase the cost-effectiveness and transparency of the funding in the effective animal advocacy movement is sufficiently high leverage that it needs a more professional tone than that likely to come from work performed by an emotionally motivated volunteer.
I would suggest that if this is the case, they fund someone to do this, rather than disparage EA volunteers or near-volunteers for not being up to the standards of paid full-time professionals. I note that GiveWell researcher salaries are substantial.
The issues raised are, after all, legitimate - Vetted Causes has led to several transparency improvements around the direction of millions of pounds of animal advocacy funding.
I mean I agree that independent scrutiny is good, that it's great if someone volunteers to do that, and it would be cool if someone could be paid to do that, but it's way understating it to say the issue with Vetted Causes was an insufficiently "professional tone" or that its work was not "up to the standards of paid full-time professionals". In my view, Vetted Causes did at least one thing that in a professional context would probably be considered an ethics violation, and might even open up an organization to legal liability.
Specifically, Vetted Causes accused a charity of fraud when that wasn't at all true, and they didn't retract the accusation after people pointed out it wasn't true. That's obviously unethical, and a lawsuit definitely wouldn't be worthwhile, nor would it set a good precent for the EA community, but it's the sort of thing you could sue someone for. It goes beyond just criticism, it's saying something false — something that Vetted Causes should have known better than to believe — in a way that would have been really damaging if people believed the falsehood.
"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor".
We posted a critique of Sinergia's 354 piglets per dollar metric on February 21, 2025. Sinergia responded by admitting the metric was wrong[1], but wouldn't stop advertising it.
On April 21, 2025, we posted that Sinergia is committing fraud (this was a legal opinion from an experienced attorney).
Less than 24 hours after the fraud post, Sinergia removed the 354 piglets per dollar metric from their main donation page, and replaced it with a new claim: 285 piglets per dollar.[2] However, this updated metric is still based on knowingly false information.
For example, the 285 figure relies on Sinergia being credited for securing a commitment from JBS to stop ear-notching pigs by 2023. But JBS never made that commitment—and both ACE and Sinergia have acknowledged this.[3] This issue alone leads to Sinergia being credited with helping over 10 million JBS piglets they did not help.[4]
We pointed this out months ago[5], and the EA community sided with ACE and Sinergia. At this point, even when metrics are acknowledged to be false, they remain in use[6] and are defended. There is little we can do about that.
Sinergia's April 17, 2025 Response
Sinergia's March 21, 2025 Response
April 21, 2025 - Sinergia Donation Page
April 21, 2025 - Vetted Causes Posts that Sinergia is Committing Fraud
April 22, 2025 - Sinergia Donation Page
Sinergia Comment - Key Quote: "JBS clearly states in Brazilian Portuguese on its website: “100% da mossa abolida até 2027,” which translates to “100% of ear cropping will be abolished by 2027.” [...] Sinergia’s Brazilian team, which is native in Portuguese but not English, made a minor mistake in the spreadsheet shared with ACE. It stated “Committed to banning ear notching by 2023,”"
ACE's Spreadsheets for Sinergia, Recording from November 6, 2025 - Cell K10 Quote: "The second comment previously read “Committed to banning ear notching by 2023" but was updated in March 2025. Because of this miscommunication, although it would have been ideal to apply discounts at both the “number of animals affected” and the “SADs averted per dollar” levels, our SADs estimates were already conservative, and the magnitude of the change would not affect our decision to recommend Sinergia. Therefore, we have not refreshed the calculations for the number of animals impacted by the commitment."
ACE's Spreadsheets for Sinergia, Recording from November 6, 2025
Vetted Causes Post from March 22, 2025
Vetted Causes Post from April 17, 2025
November 6, 2025 - Sinergia's Main Donation Page. It has now been over half a year, and Sinergia is still using the 285 piglets per dollar metric that is based on knowingly false information.
Hi Adam. I have not looked recently into the underlying claims of this comment. I agree it is good for organisations to correct mistakes. At the same time, metrics like animals helped per $ are quite uncertain due to the uncertain acceleration of the welfare reforms, and attribution of credit to the organisations involved. When an organisation says they help X animals per $, I understand it can easily help X/3 animals per $. So I do not worry much about an organisation taking a few months to update from, for example, X to 80.5 % of X (= 285/354) animals helped per $. To save time, I believe it often makes sense to collect feedback across a longer period of time, then look into it over a shorter period, and then make all the public updates at once. I also think organisations taking time to update metrics in situations like this is very far from what I would consider fraud.
In our view, it is unacceptable to:
ACE and Sinergia have done exactly that, and are continuing to do so as of this writing.[2]
[2]
Our values do not align with the values EA practices.
Sinergia March 21, 2025 Statement - Key Quote: "JBS clearly states in Brazilian Portuguese on its website: “100% da mossa abolida até 2027,” which translates to “100% of ear cropping will be abolished by 2027.” [...] Sinergia’s Brazilian team, which is native in Portuguese but not English, made a minor mistake in the spreadsheet shared with ACE. It stated “Committed to banning ear notching by 2023,”"
ACE's Spreadsheets for Sinergia, Recording from April 11 , 2025 - Cell K10 Quote: "The second comment previously read “Committed to banning ear notching by 2023" but was updated in March 2025. Because of this miscommunication, although it would have been ideal to apply discounts at both the “number of animals affected” and the “SADs averted per dollar” levels, our SADs estimates were already conservative, and the magnitude of the change would not affect our decision to recommend Sinergia. Therefore, we have not refreshed the calculations for the number of animals impacted by the commitment."
ACE's Spreadsheets for Sinergia, Recording from November 6, 2025 - Cell K10 Quote: "The second comment previously read “Committed to banning ear notching by 2023" but was updated in March 2025. Because of this miscommunication, although it would have been ideal to apply discounts at both the “number of animals affected” and the “SADs averted per dollar” levels, our SADs estimates were already conservative, and the magnitude of the change would not affect our decision to recommend Sinergia. Therefore, we have not refreshed the calculations for the number of animals impacted by the commitment."
Note that this is only one of the pieces of knowingly false information being used by ACE, and it results in Sinergia being credited for helping over 10 million JBS piglets that they did not help.
November 7, 2025 - Sinergia's Main Donation Page. It has now been over half a year, and Sinergia is still advertising the 285 piglets per dollar metric that is based on knowingly false information. Sinergia began advertising this metric on April 22, 2025.
Thanks for your reviews! They reminded me I should not take for granted the results of CEAs beside GiveWell's, even in the context of more certain inputs like years of impact, and credit attribution (instead of in the context of more uncertain ones like pain intensities, and weights to compare welfare across species, which can more easily be recognised as uncertain).