All of kierangreig🔸's Comments + Replies

Agree that it’s really great to see the fund grow so much!

That said, I don’t think it’s right to say it’s almost as large as Coefficient Giving. At least not yet... :) 

The 2025 total appears to exclude a number of grants (including one to Rethink Priorities) and only runs through August of that year. By comparison, Coefficient Giving’s farmed animal welfare funding in 2024 was around $70M, based on the figures published on their website.

Rethink Priorities is hiring an AI Strategy Team Lead. The full job description and application form are available on our careers page.

If you know anyone who may be a strong fit for applied strategy, research, or programmatic work focused on reducing AI-related existential risks and securing positive outcomes, we’d appreciate you sharing this opportunity.

We warmly encourage anyone who thinks they might be a good fit to apply.

Huge congratulations to Samantha on her new role as CEO. 

Also, shout out to Joey Savoie for the many years of work leading up to this transition.

Excited to see the continued focus on scale and impact under Samantha's leadership!

Good question. I think this recent comment addresses it. 

Rethink Priorities has opened expressions of interest for roles on our new AI Strategy Team. We are currently seeking interest for Analyst and Senior Analyst positions. The job description and expression of interest form are available on our careers page.

If you know people who might be a strong fit for applied strategy, research and other programmatic work aimed at reducing AI-related existential risks, and securing the upsides please do feel free to share. 

We strongly encourage anyone who thinks they may be a good fit to submit! :)

Hey! Yes, on subcauses, that sounds right to me. WAW as well, though that’s somewhat outside the scope of this discussion.

On profiles/job types, I’d highlight government policy and lobbying, management, fundraising, and local experts in specific but neglected populous countries.

I’m not sure that I disagree overall, but I think variance really matters here: both within subcauses/areas and between individuals. Some areas and profiles within farmed animal advocacy still seem much more talent-constrained than others, and those differences can be quite stark. Likewise, individuals often have a much greater comparative advantage for certain types of direct work depending on their skills, experience, and networks.

Because of this, while the nonprofit sector may indeed be approaching saturation in some areas, there are still pockets where... (read more)

This section from a previous research piece provides additional context on the scale of frog farming.

Sometimes, just when it seems like conditions for so many farmed animals basically couldn’t get any worse, one comes across yet another widespread industry practice that’s deeply disturbing.

Yes! 

Thanks, Caleb, glad to hear that!

Contractor rates will depend on experience, project scope, and the nature of the work. As a rough guide: for experienced independent contributors, we typically expect rates in the range of $50–$150 USD per hour. For more junior contributors, the range is likely closer to $20–$50.

That said, we’re open to a range of expectations, especially where there’s a strong fit.

Thanks for the heads-up, Vasco! Updated now :) 

Like Toby, this is my initial vote, but I may revise it as more information becomes available over time.

Thanks for engaging Michael!  

Would you be open to taking funding earmarked for one of your specific proposed projects? And generally for a specific department? 

Yes, donors can restrict their contributions to Rethink Priorities or specific projects. When making a donation, donors should specify their desired restrictions, and we will ensure the funds are allocated accordingly in our accounting. However, for relatively small donations, restricting funds to a specific project may be less practical if the project requires significantly more funding ... (read more)

For sure! :) 

Congratulations, Sjir, on your new role! Best of luck—I’m excited to see all that you’ll accomplish!

Thanks James! Someone from our team will DM you shortly. 

A few months ago, Good Ventures, the primary funder behind Open Philanthropy, decided to exit grantmaking in the areas of farmed invertebrates and wild animals, which had supported much of Rethink Priorities' work over the last 18 months, including recent publications on shrimp welfare and farmed insect welfare. While The Navigation Fund has committed to sustaining our insect welfare portfolio through 2026, other invertebrate and wild animal projects lack secure funding, making additional support crucial for their continuation. The switch in funding approa... (read more)

Sure. Before doing that a couple of quick notes. First, I think it takes a while for grants to mature and impact to play out, so that makes it difficult to judge at this point which were the biggest hits from the past year. Second, there are some grants that I have a COI with, but think may have been hits from 2022, but nonetheless won’t list them here. Third, as some further background context, the general categories of grants that I am most excited by are early-stage support to aligned groups, working on neglected animals, or in neglected places. 

Th... (read more)

Hi David, thanks for engaging! Responding to your questions below. 

1. Yes, sometimes we do this if we think that some opportunity is a particularly good fit for a different funder. Yeah, I would say applicants usually remain active long enough to reapply again in the future. It seems rare to me that our funding is the deciding factor for their continued existence. 
2. I can’t easily pull that information, and I think it depends on the year, but my very rough guess is between 3-30% of funds raised in any given year of the fund’s existence so far were cry

In terms of the present funding allocation, it is much more focused on farmed than wild animals. An important factor contributing to that is there are very few opportunities that we can support on the wild animal side at this point. The promising opportunities for wild animals that exist now receive funding from us and are some of our bigger grantees. But there’s only so far we can go with research there, and we haven’t yet identified some promising wild animal welfare intervention that groups could implement. That contributes to there being significantly ... (read more)

Thanks for the question, Vasco :) 

It is possible to donate specifically to a single area of RP?

Yes. Donors can restrict their donations to RP. When making the donation, the donor should just mention what restriction is on the donation, and then we will restrict those funds for only that use in our accounting.

If yes, to which extend would the donation be fungible with donations to other areas?

The only way this would be fungible is if it changes how we allocate unrestricted money. Based on our current plans, this would not happen for donations to our an... (read more)

Is AWF considering hiring a fundraiser to help fill this funding gap?

No, not considering hiring for strictly a fundraiser at this point. However, we are interested in adding other positions that could contribute to fundraising (as well importantly contribute in other ways). 

Specifically as mentioned in the post:

We also have some plans for significant growth next year through some internal expansion plans in the works (e.g., possibly adding further fund managers, hopefully at least one who is full-time, and doing more active grantmaking). 

To that ... (read more)

Sadly, I don't think that approach is correct. The 5th percentile of a product of random variables is not the product of the 5th percentiles---in fact, in general, it's going to be a product of much higher percentiles (20+).

As something of an aside, I think this general point was demonstrated and visualised well here. 

Disclaimer: I work RP so may be biased.  

Should be fixed now. 

This is already here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KhptcGeYBuhFRoBjA/lying-is-cowardice-not-strategy-1

It still depends somewhat on how fundraising goes, but it's pretty likely in 2024 Rethink Priorities budget (excluding a number of groups that we fiscally sponsor) will be around $11M. 

I think that the specific extrapolation of our budget completed here was importantly off because we did a number of hires over the course of 2022, so the reported spend for that year didn't fully capture total recurring costs of the new headcount (as those new hires started at various points throughout that year). 

Thanks for your engagement! 

Yes, for instance, as mentioned in the appendix, some non-fictitious examples for Global Health and Development are: 

We produced numerous research reports for Open Phil assessing the potential of global health and development interventions, looking for interventions that could be as or more cost-effective as the ones currently ranked top by GiveWell. This included full reports on the following:

• The effectiveness of large cash prizes in spurring innovation (the report was also shared with FTX Future Fund, and anothe

You're right! Just updated :) 

Ah, thanks. Fixing that now :) 

Thanks for flagging! I will fix that now :)

Interesting point and thanks for raising, Saulius. :)

That specific grant actually hasn’t been made yet. Though we approved of it, I believe it’s waiting on the university to finalize something before the funds are allocated. So, I am going to strike it from the list of grants at the top of the report (I was meant to do this before but forgot to do this even though I removed it from the paragraphs of the payout report, my apologies).

To further address your point though, I think the counterfactuals here are tricky to think about and I wouldn’t confidently cl... (read more)

Good flag! :)

Fwiw, looks like rerunning the analysis with the relative bounds on chicken moral worth being a ten-billionth to a thousandth of a human,  rather than a twenty thousandth to  10 humans, still outputs a mean cost-effectiveness ratio of CCCW to MIF of ~1.3. 

So though it is a pretty significant factor, choosing different values there seems unlikely by themselves to directionally change the output.  

I also don't think that the expected moral weight of more than twice that of a human is that intrinsic to Muehlhauser numbers. See... (read more)

My understanding is that there is still more money within farmed animal welfare and global poverty than opportunities for funding.

For farmed animal welfare, as per the title: ”We need more nuance regarding funding gaps”, I think it is indeed more nuanced than “there is more money than opps for funding in farmed animal welfare.” 

Quickly consider the likes of:

• Some of the more outstanding bigger orgs can absorb much more funding, pretty productively (think e.g. THL, GFI, CIWF, MFA, etc.) Across those outstanding big groups alone, quite likely we could ea

Hey! Good q :) Apologies for the slower reply- I was OOO for a few weeks. 

So in addition to all those grants being for EA Superstars... I think we may have just made an error in the copy and pasting process between Google Docs and posting here and on the ea funds site. :) 

Specifically the "*" elsewhere (e.g., on Contentful) indicates bolding or italics and we had all these heading parts bolded or italicized (for other grants too) previously. 

I have removed all the * now.

Thanks for asking about it!   

First, I think this is a  really good flag on an important issue and a great first post :)   

As others mentioned CIWF have a good Octopus farming report highlighting the terrible consequences for animal welfare (underrated but I believe that Octopus could live 2-3 years in these conditions). I believe CIWF also presented the report to the Animal Welfare Intergroup of the European Parliament! They have also written to various places (governments, governors etc.) trying to have the practice outlawed or shut down. 

Specifically within ... (read more)

> Also, how do you judge their expected marginal cost-effectiveness? Do you do back-of-the-envelope calculations? Compare to previous projects with estimates? Check the project team's own estimates (and make adjustments as necessary)? All of the above? Any others?

It varies by project and depends on who the grant investigator is. 

If a) the project is relatively well-suited to a back of the envelope and b) a back of the envelope seems decision-relevant, then we will engage in one. Right now, a) and b) seem true in a minority of cases, maybe ~10%-25% ... (read more)

Hi Michael, 

Good questions, and appreciate you raising them. I am going to split the responses because they’re somewhat long. 

>How do you think the expected marginal cost-effectiveness of the grantees compares to the large effective animal advocacy charities like The Humane League?

Tl;dr: Main things I think about are i) the generally lacking evidence base leaves it unresolved, ii) risk and variance across the respective portfolios, iii) "big-picture" takes about the different portfolios, and iv) dynamics at the community level, as well as, wha... (read more)

Thanks, Ben! :) 

This was really cool! Thanks a bunch for writing it up :) 

For those interested, it somewhat reminded me of Some Case Studies in Early Field Growth and Establishing a research field in the natural sciences.

One quick observation that is probably a small thing or not right: 

For the 8 fields that reached establishment, the median time between a field’s origin year and establishment year[3] was 18 years, with the quickest field (Genetic Circuits) becoming established after 5 years, and the slowest (Clean Meat) becoming established after 63 years (the

This round, we report five anonymous grants after receiving advice from internal and external advisors, and further weighing the pros and cons of public reporting. We consider these grants to have a high expected impact, and report that there were no conflicts of interest in evaluating them. 

Thanks for this post! I believe this is the first time that the Animal Welfare Fund is giving anonymous grants, but someone can correct me if I'm wrong. I was aware that the EAIF and LTFF are now able to do this, but I wasn't aware that the AWF is now able to do this too.

Thanks! Yeah, that is right, this is the first time. 

Anyway, maybe EA Funds should indicate in their Apply for Funding page and the application form that the AWF will consider funding applications from grantseekers who wish to remain anonymous in public reporting? It currently says th

Definitely! :)

Right. So I still might not be fully understanding. 

I guess it seems hard for me to understand thinking both: 

A) Diet change has more negative effects on wild animals than positive effects on farmed animals. 

And B) Diet changes’ negative effects on wild animals are in expectation greater than the positive effects from further work on wild animal welfare (e.g., of the sort WAI completes). 

But maybe I am misunderstanding. Do you think both of those? 

Separately, and another quick thought, it could be helpful to more formally model it,... (read more)

Sure. 

Very quickly, here are a few ideas/interventions that seem interesting to me:

• Helping scope whether large and respected enviro groups may lobby on this if funding was available  
• Helping establish additional university-affiliated research centers that focus on research into pb alts 
• Helping establish trade associations in important places that don’t really have them right now

Honestly, I think there’s just a lot of underexplored territory in the area. To some extent it is now about us diversifying somewhat, trying a number of differen... (read more)

Yeah, I think I would be interested in a variety of scoping projects. 

Briefly, some ideas that seem top of mind for me now are:

• Someone thinking more about some very preliminary things that could be done in the policy space 
• Or more about an organization that might focus on wild animal welfare within cities 
• Or even more about a generalist group that may be to wild animals what GFI is to alt-proteins (some variety of programs and decent emphasis on movement-building) 

However, I think the bottleneck here may be more about finding talented p... (read more)

Yes, definitely helps! :)

Fairly sure it was the ACE Research Fund. :)  

Yeah, I think your impression of the ratio is correct.

Briefly, as Michael St Jules notes, AWF interfaces with a much bigger community/movement than the LTFF currently does. I think that goes some of the way to explaining the difference in the ratio. Within the respective remits of each fund, it seems the AWF just generally has a more developed movement that it can grant to. The total FAW movement is  > $100M per year. My guess is the total EA-aligned LTF movement is now just a pretty small fraction compared to that total.    &nb... (read more)

Thanks for all your questions! :)

>What processes do you have for monitoring the outcome/impact of grants? 

We have a ~10 question questionnaire that we send grantees. We send these out 6 months after the grant's starting date - which coincides with the payment date usually. We then send them out every six months and then a final report at the grant’s end date. E.g., if the grant was for an 18-month project, we would send the progress report to that grantee at the 6-month mark, 12 months, and then 18 months. 

I feel like I am also just fairly reg... (read more)