So there are a bunch of questions in this, but I can answer some of the ops related one:

• We haven't had ops talent bottlenecks. We've had incredibly competitive operations hiring rounds (e.g. in our most recent hiring round, ~200 applications, of which ~150 were qualified at least on paper), and I'd guess that 80%+ of our finalists are at least familiar with EA (which I don't  think is a necessary requirement, but the explanation isn't that we are recruiting from a different pool I guess).
  • Maybe there was a bigger bottleneck in ~2018 and EA has grown a lot since or reached people with more ops skills since?
  • We spend a lot of time resources on recruiting, and advertise our jobs really widely, so maybe we are reaching a lot more potential candidates than some other organizations were?
• Management bottlenecks are probably our biggest current people-related constraint on growth (funding is a bigger constraint).
  • We've worked a lot on addressing this over the summer, partially by having a huge internship program, and getting a lot of current staff management experience (while also working with awesome interns on cool projects!) and sending  anyone who wants it through basic managemen

I'll let Peter/Marcus/others give the organizational answer, but speaking for myself I'm pretty bullish about having more RP-like organizations. I think there are a number of good reasons for having more orgs like RP (or somewhat different from us), and these reasons are stronger at first glance than reasons for consolidation (eg reduced communication overhead, PR). 

1. The EA movement has a strong appetite for research consultancy work, and RP is far from sufficient for meeting all the needs of the movement. 
2. RP clones situated slightly differently can be helpful in allowing the EA movement to unlock more talent than RP will be able to.
   1. For example, we are a remote-first/remote-only organization, which in theory means we can hire talent from anywhere. But in practice, many people may prefer working in an in-person org, so an RP clone with a physical location may unlock talent that RP is unable to productively use.
3. We have a particular hiring bar. It's plausible to me that having a noticeably higher or lower hiring bar can result in a more cost-effective organization than us. 
   1. For example, having a higher hiring bar may allow you to create a small tight-knit group of superge

Mostly yes. It definitely is the case that, if we were given more cash than the cash that we already have, we could meaningfully accelerate our longtermism team in a way that we cannot do with the cash we currently have. Thus funding is still an important constraint to scaling our work, in addition to some other important constraints.

However, I am moderately confident that between the existing institutional funders (OpenPhil, Survival and Flourishing Fund, Long-Term Future Fund, Longview, and others) that we could meet a lot of our funding request - we just haven’t asked yet. But (1) it’s not a guarantee that this would go well so we’d still appreciate money from other sources, (2) it would be good to add some diversity from these sources, (3) money from other sources could help us spend less time fundraising and more time accelerating our longtermism plans, (4) more funding sooner could help us expand sooner and with more certainty, and (5) its likely we could still spend more money than these sources would give.

It’s been hard for me to make five year plans, given that we’re currently only a little less than four years old and the growth between 2018 when we started and now has already been very hard to anticipate in advance!

I do think that RP could be 2x as large in five years. I’m actually optimistic that we could double in 2-3 years!

I’m less sure about how much funded work we’d do - actually I’m not sure what you mean by funded work, do you mean work directly commissioned by stakeholders as opposed to us doing work we proactively identify?

I’m also less sure about impact per dollar. We’ve found this to be very difficult to track and quantify precisely. Perhaps as 80,000 Hours talks about “impact-adjusted career changes”, we might want to talk about “impact-adjusted decision changes” - and I’d be keen to generate more of those, even after adjusting for our growth in staff and funding. I think we’ve learned a lot more about how to unlock impact from our work and I think also there will have been more time for our past work to bear fruit.

By its reputation, output, and the quality and character of management and staff, Rethink Priorities seems like an extraordinarily good EA org.

Thanks Charles for your unprompted, sincere, honest, and level-headed assessment. 

Your check will be in the mail in 3-7 business days. 

I think to better expand Rethink Priorities, we need Rethink Priorities to be bigger and more efficient.

I think the relevant constraints for "why aren't we bigger?" are:

(1): sufficient number of talented researchers that we can hire

(2): sufficient number of useful research questions we can tackle

(3): ability to ensure each employee has a positive and productive experience (basically, people management constraints and project management constraints)

(4): ops capacity - ensuring our ops team is large enough to support the team

(5): Ops and culture throughput - giving the ops enough time to onboard people (regardless of ops team size), giving people enough time to adapt to the org growth ...that is, even if we were otherwise unconstrained I still think we can't just 10x in one year because that would just feel too ludicrous

(6): proof/traction (to both ourselves and to our external stakeholders/funders) that we are on the right path and "deserve" to scale (this also just takes time)

(7): money to pay for all of the above

~

It doesn't look like (1) or (2) will constrain us anytime soon.

My guess is that (3) is our current most important constraint but that we are working by experimenting with... (read more)

Thanks so much for this question!

We have learned a lot during our Fellowship/Internship Program. Several main considerations come to mind when thinking about running a fellowship/internship program.

• Managers’ capacity and preparedness – hosting a fellow/intern may be a rewarding experience. However, working with fellows/interns is also time-consuming. It seems to be important to keep in mind that managers may need to have a dedicated portion of time to:
  • Prepare for their fellows/interns’ arrival, which may include drafting a work plan, thinking about goals for their supervisees, and establishing a plan B, in case something unexpected comes up (for example, data is delayed, and the analysis cannot take place)
  • Explain tasks/projects, help set goals, and brainstorm ideas on how to achieve these goals
  • Regularly meet with their fellows/interns to check in, monitor progress, as well as provide feedback and overall support/guidance throughout the program
  • Help fellows/interns socialize and interact with others to make them feel included, welcomed, and a part of the team/organization.
• Operations team capacity and preparedness – there are many different tasks associated with each stage of the fell

The short answer is that a) none of our past hires in longtermism (including management) had substantive  biosecurity experience or biosecurity interest and b) no major stakeholder has asked us to look into biosecurity issues.

The extended answer is pretty complicated. I will first go into why generalist EA orgs or generalist independent researchers may find it hard to go into biosecurity, explain why I think those reasons aren't as applicable to RP, and then why we haven't gone into biosecurity anyway.

Why generalist EA orgs or generalist independent researchers may find it hard to go into biosecurity

My personal impression is that EA/existential biosecurity experts currently believe that it's very easy for newcomers in the field to do more harm than good, especially if they do not have senior supervision from someone in the field. This is because existential biosecurity in particular is rife with information hazards, and individual unilateral actions can invoke the unilateralist's curse. 

Further, all the senior biosecurity people are very busy, and are not really willing to take the chance with someone new unless they a) have experience (usually academic) in adjacent field... (read more)

This is a great question! Thank you so much!

At Rethink Priorities we take an employee-focused approach. We do our best to ensure that our staff have relevant tools and resources to do their best work, while also having enough flexibility to maintain their work-life balance. Staff happiness is a high priority for us and one of our strategic goals. 

Some aspects of our employee-centered approach include:

• Competitive benefits and perks – we offer unlimited time off, flexible work schedule, professional development opportunities, stipends etc., which are available to full- and part-time staff, as well as our fellows/interns.
• Opportunities to socialize, make decisions, and take on new projects – for example, we have monthly social meetings, we run random polls to solicit opinions/ideas from staff, and create opportunities for employees to participate in various initiatives, like leading a workshop.
• Biannual all staff surveys – we collect feedback from our staff twice a year. The survey asks a series of questions about leadership, management, organizational culture, benefits and compensation, psychological safety, amongst others. The results are thoroughly analyzed and guide our de

We’re working right now on a values and culture setting exercise where we are figuring out intentionally what we like about our culture and what we want to specifically keep. I appreciate Dominika's comment but I want to add a bit more of what is coming out of this (though it isn't finished yet).

Four things I think are important about our culture that I like and try to intentionally cultivate:

Work-life balance and sustainability in our work. Lots of our problems are important and very pressing and it is easy to burn yourself out working hard on it. We have deliberately tried to design our culture for sustainability. Sure, you might get some more hours of work this year if you work harder but it isn’t worth burning out just a few years later. We want our researchers here for the long haul. We’re invested in their long-term productivity.

Rigor and calibration. It’s very easy to do research poorly and unfortunately easy to do bad research that misleads people because it is hard to see how the research is bad. Thus a lot of work must be done by our researchers to ensure that our work is accurate and useful.

Ownership. In a lot of organizations, managers want their employees to do exactly... (read more)

One major factor that makes some research questions more suited to academia is requiring technical or logistical resources that would be hard to access or deploy in a generalist EA org like RP (some specialist expertise also sometimes falls into this category). Much WAW research is like this, in that I don't think it makes sense for RP to be trying to run large-scale ecological field studies.

Another major factor is if you want to promote wider field-building or you want the research to be persuasive as advocacy to certain audiences in the way that sometimes only academic research can. This also applies to much WAW research.

Personally, I think in a most other cases academia is typically not the best venue for EA research, although the latter considerations about field-building and the prestige/persuasiveness of academic research recurs sufficiently commonly that I think the question of whether a given project is worth publishing academically recurs fairly commonly even within RP.

One thing the EA community can help us with is by encouraging  suitable candidates to apply to our jobs. (New ones will be posted here and announced in our newsletter.) Some of our most recent hires have transitioned from fields which, at first sight, would seem unlikely to produce typical applicants. But we're open to anyone proving us they can do the job during the application process (we do blinded skills assessments). I think we're really not credentialist (i.e. we don't care much about formal degress if people have gained the skills that we're looking for). So whenever you read a job ad and think "Oh, this friend could actually do that job!", do tell them to apply if they're interested.

More importantly, I think EA community builders in all geographies and fields can greatly help us by training people to become good at the type of reasoning that's important in EA jobs. I particularly think of reasoning transparency,  expressing degrees of (un)certainty and clarifying the epistemic status of what you write. Furthermore, probabilistic thinking and  Bayesian updating. Also learning to build models and getting familiar with tools like Guesstimate and Causal. Forecast... (read more)

I recently spent ~2 hours reflecting on RP's longtermism department's wins, mistakes, and lessons learned from our first year[1] and possible visions for 2022. I'll lightly adapt the "lessons learned for Michael specifically" part of that into a comment here, since it seems relevant to what you're trying to get at here; I guess a more effective person in my role would match my current strengths but also already be nailing all the following things. (I guess hopefully within a year I'll ~match that description myself.)

(Bear in mind that this wasn't originally written for public consumption,  skips over my "wins", etc.)

• "Focus more
  • Concrete implications:
    • Probably leave FHI (or effectively scale down to 0-0.1 FTE) and turn down EA Infrastructure Fund guest manager extension (if offered it)
    • Say no to side things more often
    • Start fewer posts, or abandon more posts faster so I can get other ones done
    • Do 80/20 versions of stuff more often
    • Work on getting more efficient at e.g. reviewing docs
  • Reasons:
    • To more consistently finish things and to higher standards (rather than having a higher number of unfinished or lower quality things)
    • And to mitigate possible stress on my part, [personal thing], a

Some ways someone can be more effective than me:

• I'm not as aggressive at problem/question/cause prioritization as I could be. I can see improvements of 50-500% for someone who's (humanly) better at this than me.
• I'm not great at day-to-day time management either. I can see ~100% improvement in that regard if somebody is very good at this.
• I find it psychologically very hard to do real work for >30h/week, so somebody with my exact skillset but who could productively work for >40h/week without diminishing returns would be >33% more valuable.
• I pride myself of the speed and quantity I write, but I'm slower than eg MichaelA, and I think it's very plausible that a lot of my outputs are still bottlenecked by writing speed. 10-50% effectiveness improvement seems about right.
• I don't have perfect mental health and I'm sometimes emotional. (I do think I'm above average at both). I can see improvements of 5-25% for people who don't have these issues.
• I'm good at math* but not stellar at it. I can imagine someone who's e.g. a Putnam Fellow be 3-25% more effective than me if they chose to work on the same problems I work on (though plausibly they'd be more effective because they'd gravitat

I'm particularly glad you  note this since the survey team's research in particular is almost exclusively non-public research (basically the EA Survey and EA Groups Survey are the only projects we publish on the Forum), so people understandably get a very skewed impression of what we do.

I would break this down into a) the methods for getting research in front of government orgs and b) the types of research that gets put in front of them.

In general I think we (me for sure) haven’t been optimising for this enough to even know the barriers (unknown unknowns). I think historically we’ve been mostly focused on foundations and direct work groups, and less on government and academia. This is changing so I expect us to learn a lot more going forward.

As for known unknowns in the methods, I still don’t know who to actually send my research to in various government agencies, what contact method they respond best to (email, personal contact, public consultations, cold calling, constituency office hours?), or what format they respond best to (a 1 page PDF with graphs, a video, bullet points, an in person meeting? - though this public guide Emily Grundy made on UK submissions while at RP has helped me). Anecdotally it seems remarkably easy to get in front of some: I know of one small animal advocacy organization that managed to get a meeting with the Prime Minister of their country, and I myself have had 1-1 meetings with more than two dozen members of the UK and Irish parliam... (read more)

It has been said before elsewhere by Peter, but worth stating again:read and practice Reasoning Transparency . Michael Aird compiled some great resources recently here.

I'd also refer people to Michael and Saulius' replies to arushigupta's similar subquestion in last year's RP AMA.