We're Rethink Priorities. AMA.

To me, the main disadvantage of being funded through a fund is that I would be tied to a research topic and a timeframe in which I would have to complete the project (or at least that’s how I imagine it). Working at an organization allows me much more flexibility. I can begin researching a topic, see that it’s not as tractable as I thought, and then drop it. Alternatively, I can increase the scope of the project, or change it into something different, depending on what I feel will be more impactful. All of these scenarios happen often because the more I work on the project, the more informed I am about the most promising directions of that project.

My research would not be at the same level of quality if I were operating independently. The ability to easily draw on the knowledge, experience, skills, and general expertise of my colleagues at RP greatly improves my work. I can always count on getting high-quality feedback from at least half a dozen people, and if I get stuck in the middle of the project, I can normally count on someone to help me out. There is some loss of independence working at RP versus being funded directly, but I think the research guidance I receive more than makes up for the loss of independence. And RP's research agenda is mostly set collectively, anyway. So, in short, I expect that in most cases researchers at organizations like RP are going to be much more productive than independent researchers. ("Synergy" is the buzzword that comes to mind.)

I agree with much of what the team has written.

Also, perhaps there is a stronger accountability mechanism from having a team and things like a Slack channel in comparison to a funded independent researcher-depending on how involved an EA Fund type organization are in checking in and if funds are recalled if a researcher "fails". I don't have a good sense of the independent researcher funding landscape though.

Maybe to the extent one couples their work as a researcher with their identity, a clearer community might exist under an umbrella organization. Though I could imagine independent researchers all funded by the same organization could establish some sort of cohort mentality if communicative structures are available.

To add to the operations support benefit, I have in mind the evidence from the "disruptive research teams" literature review that suggested "researchers should be freed from trivial or bureaucratic tasks as much as possible", which seems to be less likely to be the case for an independent researcher. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dCjz5mgQdiv57wWGz/ingredients-for-creating-disruptive-research-teams

We have raised half his salary for 2020 and 2021 on a grant explicitly for this purpose. If you’d like to talk more about this, I’d be happy for you to shoot me an email: marcus [at] rtcharity.org

We’re not going to comment on the funding situations of other EA organizations. However, to the extent this is true of us, it’s probably because of the expansion we had last year. I think other organizations have grown more slowly, for a variety of reasons.

We were also lucky to start the organization with several senior people (David, Peter, and Marcus) who were able to immediately manage others. We then deliberately hired and designed our team structure with paths toward future management and team growth in mind, to enable us to expand more.

Academic publication is a long process with unclear value for our organization. We don’t currently see the primary target audience for this being the broader academic audience. This might be something we consider in the future.

Yea, I find this really difficult to think about. I think if I’d never joined Rethink, I’d have ended up continuing to work in the global poverty space (>70%). If I left Rethink now, I’d probably look for (longtermist-oriented) research and research-adjacent jobs at EA orgs and EA-aligned think tanks.

I think it's unlikely I'd be able to continue doing cross-cause area work, but unsure which specific cause area I would primarily be focusing on. 35% likely: EA aligned research in a non-EA organization. 15% likely: EA aligned work in a different EA organization. 15% likely: non-EA aligned work. 10% likely: Charity Entrepreneurship's incubation program. 25% likely: Unsure

If I hadn't been hired by RP, I probably would have ended up working for a random tech company in Austin, where I live, or maybe I would have ended up doing admissions counseling remotely (which is lucrative but soul-sucking work). If I left RP now I would try to work for a different EA research org.

It's really hard to know. At first I'd take a career break. Maybe eventually I'd start applying to some similar researcher jobs. Or some other kinds of jobs in animal welfare. Or I would get a programming job and save enough money for another career break. I'd also consider finding some job that doesn't require much logical thinking like circling instructor.

I honestly don’t know. I’d probably be doing research at another EA charity, or potentially leading (or trying to lead) a slightly different EA charity that doesn’t currently exist. Generally, I have previously seriously considered working at other EA organizations but it's been some time since I've seriously considered this topic.

I would be doing more of my academic research, at present Rethink Priorities definitely accounts for most of my time. I would probably also be doing more work for Rethink Charity and Charity Entrepreneurship, who I had been working for, but reduced/stopped my hours to work more for Priorities.

My guess is that I would still continue to keep up my hybrid EA research + earning-to-give in data science, except instead of running an EA research organization I would just do independent EA research on my own.

Also, if Rethink Priorities didn't exist, I think the chances of me going full-time into EA research (as I am now working on doing) would be much lower, though there is a decent chance I would've applied to work as a researcher at OpenPhil (though, of course, I don't know if I would've been hired).

Thanks for the question! We do research informed by input from funders, organizations, and researchers that we think will help funders make better grants and help direct work organizations do to higher impact work.

So our plans for distribution vary by the audience in question. For funders and particular researchers we make direct efforts to share our work with them. Additionally, we try to regularly have discussions about our work and priorities with the relevant existing research EA communities (researchers themselves and org leaders). However, as we've said recently in our impact and strategy update, we think we can do a better job of this type of communication going forward.

For the wider EA community, we haven't undertaken significant efforts to drive more discussion on posts but this is something potentially worth considering. I'd say one driver of whether we'd actually decide to do this would be if we came to believe more work here would potentially increase the chances we hit the goals I mentioned above.

Hey Aaron, good question!

I’m currently in touch with folks at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and a few other similar think tanks, but I don’t think my work has meaningfully influenced their views/activities. My hope is that this will change as I continue building my relationships with them.

To date, I think the audience that has engaged most with (and gotten the most value out of) the nuclear risks series is funders in the EA space. For example, I understand that multiple EA funders/grantmakers have drawn on (and augmented) some of my nuclear risks models as part of some cause prioritization work they've done.

This was a very deliberate decision on our part. Our primary goal is to get EA decision-makers to make better decisions as a result of our work. We thought the most likely place these decision-makers would see our work is on the EA Forum. We also thought people would be more likely to read the work if we wrote it in an article that didn’t require clicking through to a further page or PDF, on the idea that the clickthrough rate to reports is pretty low. It’s also nice to be able to track our impact via some loose proxies like upvotes and the EA Forum prize.

That being said, I think now that external PDFs might be better to have on hand to use for non-EAs, especially those that think of the EA Forum as looking lower prestige relative to a nice, glossy PDF. So that might be something we consider more in the future as we aim to grow our audience and influence.

Lastly, we thought there might be some additional small spillover impact on the EA community by creating a stronger culture of research around the EA Forum. I think having Rethink Priorities host our research here invites other people to be more interested in the EA Forum and more likely to post their own research here, which seems like a good thing.

Follow-up question: Have you been happy with this choice so far? Are there ways the Forum could change such that you'd expect to get a lot more value out of posting research here?

Like Saulius, I am pretty sceptical about the narrative I have in my mind on this issue now. One day I would like to take time and re-read some old messages and emails to tease out what I was thinking, or at least what story I was telling myself, then.

For the moment, this is how I recall events and my thinking. I first heard of EA when a friend at Oxford gave me Doing Good Better as a gift. I recall reading it cover to cover during a trip the following week and being enthused by it to the extent of making detailed notes and re-gifting it back to my friend with my annotations. I considered it one of many interesting frameworks to guide one's life and took onboard some ideas I surmised from it like donating based on cost-effectiveness and thinking more deeply about the suffering of others. My engagement with EA remained quite flat for few years after that and I am not sure how “involved” I could consider myself. Later, I was accepted for intern positions with Animal Charity Evaluators and Charity Entrepreneurship. I’m unsure exactly how at the front of my mind EA was in this time. On the one hand I was applying for many positions that I thought were simply interesting, but not necessarily EA aligned. On the other hand, I attended my first EAG shortly after applying for/starting these positions and therefore must have applied to attend months before because it was happening in a city my then employer was based in. I think much of it came down to me having a lot of free time, the desire to find new interesting work and casting a very wide net, and to an extent being in the right place at the right time. In any case, meeting EAs in person, both at EAG and through Charity Entrepreneurship, and seeing the community behind the ideas was a revelation for me.

I keep working on it for a mix of selfish reasons like finding the work interesting and a sense of community, and to a lesser extent becoming more convinced of the impact of the movement and that my working on it is the best resource I can offer.

This is the story that I tell myself about myself but I’m really unsure about the accuracy of it.

I was utilitarian since I was a teen (way before I knew the term). I decided to earn-to-give and found out about GiveWell and ACE when researching where to give. I got really interested when I discovered Brian Tomasik’s website after googling something about utilitarianism. Shortly after that I began participating in EA facebook group, I don’t remember how. I saw some people discussing donations and salaries there and they were much higher than mine because I was living in Lithuania. In 2015 I decided to emigrate to London so that I could earn and donate more money. In London, I went to an EA meetup. It was a shock because up until that point I haven’t met anyone who is altruistic and most of the people in my life were alienated by my altruism and tried to talk me out of donating my money. Making friends with other EAs at meetups in London has greatly increased my motivation to do EA stuff. Soon I was spending most of my free time on EA-related activities. Combined with other factors, this has led me to burn out in 2017. I’m not sure I’ve ever fully recovered from it.

I think I keep working on EA stuff now because:

• It’s my job and it would be difficult to find a better job even from a purely selfish perspective
• I still care about making the world a better place (though not as much as I used to before burning out)
• It feels easy and natural to work on EA stuff because my brain is used to think in the utilitarian way and because I hang out with other EAs all the time

However, I have little faith in humans knowing why they do anything so maybe these are not the real reasons.

Like a lot of EAs, I first became convinced of these ideas through Peter Singer.

I first read him, and Famine, Affluence and Morality in particular, when I was doing A Level religious studies in 2004 and from then on was convinced that we are obliged to give all excess wealth to the most effective charities (or do something else if that was more effective of course).

I then went to study Philosophy, directly inspired by this, and spent a lot of time telling anyone who would listen about these ideas with no effect whatsoever. I was particularly shocked and appalled that not only did none of the philosophers I encountered take these or any other actually-oriented-at-helping-the-world ideas seriously, but none seemed to take utilitarianism seriously. I was therefore pretty delighted to see Toby Ord announce his intention to give everything he earned over a certain amount to charity, since I thought all philosophers should be doing this, and I've been following EA ever since.

As to what now keeps me working on EA: it would be the awareness of the manifold terrible horrors (horrors so great that any individual experiencing them would pay almost any price to avoid them) constantly occurring in the world.

My background is in philosophy, so I've been familiar with (and convinced by) Peter Singer's work since roughly 2007. I first heard about EA in early 2015 when Will MacAskill gave a talk at UT Austin, where I was working on my PhD. He and I chatted a bit about Bostrom's Superintelligence, which I happened to be reading at the time for totally unrelated reasons. Talking about AI safety and global poverty (the subject of Will's talk) in the same conversation was kind of a revelatory moment, and all of EA's conceptual pieces just sort of fell into place.

The thing that keeps me motivated is how intrinsically interesting I find my research. Of course I hope to make a difference, but my work is so far removed from immediate measurable impact that I don't really think about that on a day-to-day basis.

I wrote about my EA origin story here.

But organizations did leafleting for a while, realized there were more effective uses of resources, and then stopped leafleting [...] It was only after that that evidence that leafleting was not very effective emerged in the research literature.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that it’s accidental that things happened in this order. If the same research about leafleting was done earlier, it could’ve had an impact by making organizations deprioritize leafleting earlier. I don’t think that we can trust organizations always to realize what is a more effective use of their resources without any research. There are too many biases in human nature, and it’s often just not obvious enough.

I also feel that so far, animal welfare research didn’t have that much impact. And I do feel more skeptical about it because of it. However, I’m not sure there was enough animal advocacy research to conclude that we should deprioritize it. Research is a hit-based endeavor. Just because we (EAA researchers) haven’t had many hits in our very short history, doesn’t mean that they will never happen. Note that it’s also possible that some of the research we already did will become a hit and make an impact in the future (e.g., our work on invertebrate sentience or fish stocking).

The situation in animal advocacy seems to be that we have very many options about what to do, and we don’t know which options are the best. That does sound like a situation that could be improved by research.

How do you engage with the animal welfare advocacy groups who might act on your research?

We talk to them, try to understand what they do and why, ask what research they would find useful, and ask whether our research has influenced their decisions (we did it via a survey and informally).

Or alternatively, how do you counteract any negatives from not being an advocacy organization, and not getting feedback directly (e.g. advocacy that responds to research because they are done in conjunction)?

What do you think are the main relevant differences between the team being in-house versus a separate organization? The way I see it, all of us in the EAA movement are a part of the same team, working towards the same goals. A president of an animal charity can go to us and ask us to research a particular topic in a similar way they could go to their in-house research team. I guess one difference is that if they go to us, it’s up to us to decide whether to pursue the suggested topic but I don’t see why that would necessarily be worse.^[1] Of course, I’m unsure about this as I’ve never worked for an in-house team.

I think some of the main ways will be:

• Generating new cause areas/interventions/charities
• Moving investment away from ineffective interventions
• Causing there to be a lot more active EA researchers

I don't think those will differ too much across the short/long term, except that shifting resources away from bad interventions may happen more in the short term.

Hi,

You're correct that we have a remote team located in many countries.

1)Challenges

Time zone challenges are definitely present with such a global team, especially for scheduling. There is also a barrier to having natural interactions in the way that would randomly happen in an office.

2)Frequent & Smooth communication

Slack is immensely useful for quick and easy communication. We have daily check-ins on Slack to let each other know what we are working on. We share what we are working on in Google Docs for others to comment and collaborate on. Some team members have frequent calls with managers or eachother. We have a randomized rotating system to pair people up for social calls. RP has monthly all-staff calls. We particiapte in the wider Rethink Charity "all-hands" calls.

Animal Charity Evaluator's roundtable discussions about remote teams have definitely informed my own personal view of what might work well and that the issues we encounter are pretty common for remote teams. https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/tag/roundtable-series/

For fish, I'd refer you to the "Questions for Further Consideration" section of the ACE Farmed Fish Report (which we contributed research to).

For invertebrates, we wrote a three part series on next steps for research: see Part 1 on fundamental research, Part 2 on intervention research, and Part 3 on attitudes research.

Thanks for the question and thanks for the compliment about our work! As to the impact of the work, from our Impact survey:

Invertebrate sentience was the second most common (13) piece of work that changed beliefs. Also the second largest number of changed actions of all our work (alongside EA survey) including 1 donation influenced, 1 research inspiration, and 4 unspecified actions.

Informally, I could add many people (probably >10) in the animal welfare space have personally told me they think our work on invertebrates changed their opinion about invertebrate sentience (though there is, of course, a chance these people were overemphasizing the work to me). A couple of academics have also privately told us they thought our work was worthwhile and useful to them. These people largely aren't donors though and I doubt many of them have started to give to invertebrate charities.

That said, I think the impact of this project in particular is difficult to judge. The diffuse impact of possibly introducing or normalizing discussion of this topic is difficult to capture in surveys, particularly when the answers are largely anonymous, and the payoffs even if people have been convinced to take them seriously may not occur until there is an actionable intervention to possibly support.

Thanks for the question. We have forthcoming work on ballot initiatives which will hopefully be published in January and other work that we plan to keep unpublished (though accessible to allies) for the foreseeable future.

In addition, we have some plans to investigate potentially high value policies for animal welfare.

On CE's work, we communicate with them fairly regularly about their work and their plans, in addition to reading and considering the outputs of their work.

Understanding how research can influence decision makers or have an impact in some other ways. Similarly, understanding how charities and funders make decisions. Even though I talked with funders and heads of charities quite a lot, I still feel that I only have a very incomplete picture of what factors end up influencing their decisions, I can't quite put myself in their shoes.

Hands-on experience and understanding how charities operate, what problems they face, etc. I think I'd be a better researcher if I worked in an animal charity before in some very generalized role where I have to do almost everything (there are fewer such roles nowadays because there is a lot of specialization)

Good research topics that could influence decision-makers (feel free to suggest them!)

I agree that bivalves are probably the least likely to be sentient of the animals that are easily available to eat. I wouldn't necessarily recommend eating them because there may be issues with the way they are collected. (I haven't looked into this at all.) I don't eat them because I don't find it particularly hard not to eat meat, and it's easier to explain my dietary restrictions to people if there aren't too many exceptions.

The research I did for my honey bee report has affected the way I feel about almonds. It hasn't really reduced my almond consumption, but I now feel slightly guilty about eating almonds. Modern almond farming is pretty bad for bees, and bees are super cool and smart. From a bee welfare perspective, I'm pretty confident eating commercially farmed almonds is worse than eating wildflower honey. (Note that most honey is not wildflower honey.)

I used to somewhat regularly eat shrimp because I did not think they were sentient. As a result of this report, I now do not eat shrimp and have returned to being vegetarian.

I already did not consume bivalves mainly because I don't like their taste, so that hasn't been a concern for me.

Also, behaviour generally, like being more careful while walking outside, or in dealing with insects and spiders in your homes?

We welcome cause-specific donations. 100% of any animal-specific funding is always 100% spent on pro-animal research. Many of our grants have been restricted by cause (for animals, longtermism, or meta work).

We do think there are a lot of benefits to working across causes and there is a lot of transfer of knowledge. For example, quantitative methods used in global health and economic development apply very well to analyzing animal-focused interventions. Additionally, work on animal-focused policy informs our approach to longtermist-focused policy and vice-versa. We think a good amount of our impact as a research organization could come from uncovering these cross-cause insights.

I take moral uncertainty extremely seriously, but my most preferred theory is classical hedonic utilitarianism. My most prominent uncertainties are about non-utilitarian consequentialisms which would include non-experiential goods (not preference utilitarian) and downside focused views.

I'm almost entirely uncertain about prescriptive metaethics. As someone who's pretty Wittgensteinian, I'm inclined to see much debate between metaethical theories as confused. The metaethical views which (fwiw) strike me as most appealing don't have too much to differentiate them in practice, i.e. versions of softer realism or anti-realism which give a central role to what would actually be rationally endorseable by humans in certain conditions.

My descriptive metaethical views, however, are that folk metaethical discourse and judgement is almost entirely indeterminate with regards to philosophers' metaethical theories. i.e. there is no determinate fact of the matter as to whether folk views best fit realism/anti-realism, objectivism/relativism etc., and that the folk evince a contextually and inter-personally variable mix of conflicting metaethical commitments or proto-commitments. (e.g. Gill, 2009, Don Loeb (2008) and their exchanges).

Although I think the view that there are no ethical obligations should be taken seriously, I certainly (inside view) view altruism as an obligation and I think if I were convinced of anti-realism and/or moral nihilism, I think I would likely continue to view it in a very obligation-like way.

I wrote up my meta-ethical views here. I endorse End-Relational Theory. I am a moral realist but not a moral monist/universalist.

Ethically, I am some form of utilitarian consequentialist. I lean toward an objective list theory of value but I have a decent amount of moral uncertainty around this.

For implementing utilitarianism in practice, I lean toward Hare's Two-Level Utilitarianism. Also, in practice, I put a large amount of additional weight on myself, my immediate family, and my friends.

I do see altruism as an ethical obligation, though do see my meta-ethical views for lots of caveats about what this means and doesn't mean.

My impression is that I'm considerably less of a consequentialist than the average EA. Mostly I'm just pretty uncertain and so I put some stock in (some forms of) deontology and virtue ethics.

I'm a metaethical realist.

One's obligations are context-sensitive, so I can't say for sure what altruistic obligations others have. But for a person in my circumstances, I believe altruism (in many forms) is a moral obligation, one that I'm continually failing to fulfill.

Thanks for the question! We do not view our work as necessarily focused on the West. To the extent our work so far has focused on such countries, it's because that's where we think our comparative advantage currently has centered but as our team learns, and possibly grows, this won't necessarily hold over time.

I plan to contact people in Asia and talk to them about research priorities and other things after I finish my current project. I already began collecting some contacts.

My ethical and philosophical views haven't changed a huge amount.

I've become even less confident in most EA interventions than I was (and I started out very unconfident). I think there are various plausible reasons why most EA activities could easily turn out to be net negative. I don't know whether I have become more or less confident about research specifically in recent years in absolute terms, but it's definitely become relatively more appealing (as a relatively robust strategy) as a result.

Ethics: some years ago I was utilitarian and I pushed myself to do utilitarian things. Then I realized that there are other values that I care about and I tried to specify what they are. Eventually I realized that it’s impossible because there are too many. I then still tried to specify what actions should I push myself to do in order to achieve my vaguely-defined long-term goals. Now I abandoned even that and I just do whatever I want. It didn’t really change much in terms of behaviour. E.g., I still want to never lie. I just don’t think about it in terms of ethics. Also, my mindset is different, more easy-going. Some ethical stances did change though. For example, past-me would’ve pressed a button to create an utilitronium shockwave because it’s a logical conclusion to utilitarianism. Now I wouldn’t press such button because I don’t want to. I don’t claim that this approach to life and ethics is better or correct in any way though, and I don’t know if I should stick to it. If anyone has reasons why I should change it, I’d be curious to read.

I have a lot of vague aspirations over the next 5-10 years, but in practice I only plan about six months out at most. I think while people overestimate how much we can do in a day, people tend to dramatically underestimate how much they can do in 5-10 years. The space of opportunities changes so dramatically over a six month interval that it is very difficult to plan further than that.

Internally, as part of Rethink Charity, we have fairly standard formal anti-harassment, discrimination, and reasonable accommodation policies. That is, we comply with all relevant anti-discrimination laws, including [Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA.)] We explicitly prohibit offensive behavior (e.g. derogatory comments towards colleagues of a specific gender or ethnicity.)

We also provide a way for any of our staff to offer anonymous feedback and information to senior management (which can help assist someone in the reporting a claim of harassment or discrimination)

Finally, I’d note that during our hiring round last year we pretty actively sought out and promoted our job to a diverse pool of candidates and we tracked performance of hiring on these metrics. We plan to continue this going forward.

I'm just proud we've survived as an organization so far and that we hired so many wonderful and talented people!

Thanks for the comment!

I just wanted to add my 2 cents. I work at FHI (near GPI) and am separately involved with Rethink Charity, so am involved (somewhat) in both.

I'd agree that Rethink Priorities' work is formatted very differently than that of GPI, but am really not sure I'd say it's lower quality on average. I'd have to spend much more time investigating both to be more sure of either side being "higher in quality" to whatever that could be compared (perhaps, differences in the rates of under-inspection-errors).

My impression is that Rethink Priorities is attempting optimizing it's research for EA endeavors. So, if you would prefer them spend more time to change the formatting or similar, I'm sure they would be curious to know. I imagine they could shift more to produce LaTeX-type work, but that may take more time; but if this community would find it correspondingly more valuable, it could be worth it.

I'm also interested in this question for my own work and similar.