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

I agree with Jason. Additionally, I probably wouldn't be a researcher if I didn't work for an organization like RP because of operational costs, security/risk, and well-being reasons. But more importantly, since I'm at an early stage of my career as a researcher, if I worked independently, I wouldn't count on the support of my team and researchers with more experience. That would make it very difficult for me to improve and develop professionally as a researcher.

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.

I'd be interested in what organizations you're comparing against? I wonder if it is more that animal advocacy research is funding constrained compared to global poverty or x-risks, and that ends up negatively impacting groups that do research on animal advocacy and other topics.

I think their invertebrate sentience research could become a publication, similar to

Sneddon, L. U., Elwood, R. W., Adamo, S. A., & Leach, M. C. (2014). Defining and assessing animal pain. Animal behaviour, 97, 201-212. https://animalstudiesrepository.org/acwp_arte/69/

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.

I applied to RP when I decided to make an important change in my career. If RP hadn't hired me, I'd have kept trying it at different EA organizations, maybe as an intern. Yet, I would likely have ended up working in a management position at a local NGO.

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.

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.

The following is a tidy, oversimplified version of what happened.

I learned about Bentham and Mill in A-level history class (aged 17) and I think read a Peter Singer book. I was very left-wing at the time but I remember being really frustrated that all the other altruistically-minded kids in my class supported standard leftist policies for ideological reasons even when they harmed disadvantaged people. This influenced me to study philosophy at undergrad level, where I defended utilitarianism.

Unfortunately EA hadn’t been invented at the time so I spent the first year after graduation working in warehouses and call centers, followed by about nine years of direct development work in low-income countries. I got frustrated by the inefficiency of most development orgs and decided to switch fields into either law (‘earning to give’ before I'd heard of the concept) or public health (to do direct work with more quantifiable impacts).

Around the same time I was searching online for information about charity evaluation and came across GiveWell, then the Singer TED Talk and the wider EA community. This may have influenced me to choose public health, though there were ... (read more)

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 necess

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.

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.

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/

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.

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 do think that the chances of bivalves being sentient are quite low. However, I do not eat them because I'm already used to a plant-based diet, and given our uncertainty, I adhere to the precautionary principle in this case.

In general, I would not recommend consuming marine invertebrates produced in countries where trawling is not banned, given its impact on other aquatic animals for whom there is a high probability that they are sentient (i.e., fish and other vertebrates).

Still, I'm unsure about the consequences of promoting bivalve consumption, even if they are farmed. I'm concerned about how some people might interpret such a message –e.g., they may assume, without much thought, that consuming other more complex invertebrates (e.g., shrimps) is equivalent.

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’m not a philosopher, but to the extent I have opinions on such things they are about the same as Moss’s, i.e. classical hedonistic utilitarianism with quite a lot of moral uncertainty. I have somewhat suffering-focused intuitions but (a) I’ve never seen a remotely convincing argument for a suffering-focused ethic, and (b) I think my intuitions – and, I suspect, those of many people who identify as suffering-focused – can be explained by other factors. In particular, I think there are problems with the scales people use to measure valence/wellbeing/value of lives, both in reality and in thought experiments, e.g. it seems common for philosophers to assume a symmetrical scale like -10 to +10, whereas it seems pretty obvious to me that the worst lives – or even, say, the 5th percentile of lives – are many times more bad then the best lives are good. So if the best few percent of lives are 10/10 and 0 is equivalent to being dead, the bottom few percent of any large population are probably somewhere between -100 and -100,000. (It is not widely appreciated just how awful things are for so many people.) If true, classical utilitarianism may have policy implications similar to prioritarianism and related theories, e.g. more resources for the worst off (assuming tractability). But I haven’t seen much literature on these scale issues so I’m not confident this is correct. If you know of any relevant research, preferably peer-reviewed, I’d be very interested.

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,

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.

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.

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 question! To echo Ozzie, I don't think it's fair to directly compare the quality of our work to the quality of GPI's work given we work in overlapping but quite distinct domains with different aims and target audiences.

Additionally, we haven't prioritized publishing in academic journals, though we have considered it for many projects. We don't believe publishing in academic journals is necessarily the best path towards impact in the areas we've published in given our goals and don't view it as our comparative advantage.

All this said, we don't deliberately err more towards quantity over quality, but we do consider the time tradeoff of further research on a given topic during the planning and execution phases of a project (though I don't think this is in any way unique to us within EA). We do try to publish more frequently because of our desire for (relatively) shorter feedback loops. I'd also say we think our work is high quality but I'll let the work speak for itself.

Finally, I take no position on whether EA organizations in general ought to err more or less towards academic publications as I think it depends on a huge number of factors specific to the aims and staffs of each organization.