Hi, all.
We're the staff at Rethink Priorities and we would like you to Ask Us Anything! We'll be answering all questions starting Tuesday, 15 December.
About the Org
Rethink Priorities is an EA research organization focused on influencing funders and key decision-makers to improve decisions within EA and EA-aligned organizations. You might know of our work on quantifying the amount of farmed vertebrates and invertebrates, interspecies comparisons of moral weight, ballot initiatives as a tool for EAs, the risk of nuclear winter, or running the EA Survey, among other projects. You can see all our work to date here and some of our ongoing projects here.
Over the next few years we plan to expand our work in animal welfare, relaunch our work in longtermism, and continue our work in movement building, and much more.
About the Team
Leadership
Marcus A. Davis - Co-Executive Director
Marcus is a co-founder and co-Executive Director at Rethink Priorities, where he leads research and strategy. He's also a co-founder of Charity Entrepreneurship and Charity Science Health, where he previously systematically analyzed global poverty interventions, helped manage partnerships, and implemented the technical aspects of the project.
Peter Hurford - Co-Executive Director
Peter is the other co-founder and co-Executive Director of Rethink Priorities. Prior to running Rethink Priorities, he was a data scientist in industry for five years at DataRobot, Avant, Clearcover, and other companies. He also has a Triple Master Rank on Kaggle (an international data science competition) and have achieved top 1% performance in five different Kaggle competitions. He was a previous long-time board member at Animal Charity Evaluators and he continues to serve on the board at Charity Science.
Research
David Moss - Principal Research Manager
David Moss is the Principal Research Manager at Rethink Priorities. He previously worked for Charity Science and has worked on the EA Survey for several years. David studied Philosophy at Cambridge and is an academic researcher of moral psychology.
Kim Cuddington - Distinguished Researcher
Kim Cuddington is a Distinguished Researcher at Rethink Priorities and is an Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo. She has a PhD in Zoology, a Masters in Biology, and a Masters in Philosophy. She also has a background in ecology and mathematical modeling.
David Reinstein - Distinguished Researcher
Senior lecturer in economics at the University of Exeter. His research has covered a number of topics including charitable giving and social influences on giving. He originally received his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley under Emmanuel Saez.
Jason Schukraft - Senior Research Manager
Jason is a Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities. Before joining the RP team, Jason earned his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Jason specializes in questions at the intersection of epistemology and applied ethics.
David Rhys Bernard - Senior Staff Researcher
David is a PhD candidate at the Paris School of Economics and has a Masters in Public Policy and Development. He has a background in causal inference and econometrics and has previously worked at Giving What We Can and the United Nations Development Programme.
Saulius Šimčikas - Senior Staff Researcher
Saulius is a Senior Staff Researcher at Rethink Priorities. Previously, he was a research intern at Animal Charity Evaluators, organized Effective Altruism events in the UK and Lithuania, and worked as a programmer.
Neil Dullaghan - Staff Researcher
Neil is a Staff Researcher at Rethink Priorities. He also volunteers for Charity Entrepreneurship and Animal Charity Evaluators. Before joining RP, Neil worked as a data manager for an online voter platform and has an academic background in Political Science.
Holly Elmore - Staff Researcher
Holly Elmore is a Staff Researcher at Rethink Priorities and has a background in evolutionary biology and ecology. Before working at RP, she earned a PhD from Harvard University in the department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. While at Harvard, she organized Harvard University Effective Altruism Student Group, serving as president for two years.
Derek Foster - Staff Researcher
Derek is a Staff Researcher at Rethink Priorities. He studied philosophy and politics as an undergraduate, followed by public health and health economics at master’s level. Before joining RP, Derek worked on the Global Happiness Policy Report and various other projects related to global health, education, and subjective well-being.
Daniela R. Waldhorn - Staff Researcher
Daniela is a Staff Researcher at Rethink Priorities. She is a PhD candidate in Social Psychology, and has a background in management and operations.
Before joining RP, Daniela worked for Animal Ethics and for Animal Equality.
Linchuan Zhang - Staff Researcher
Linchuan (Linch) Zhang is a Staff Researcher at Rethink Priorities working on forecasting and longtermist research. Before joining RP, he did forecasting projects around Covid-19, including with superforecasters and University of Oxford researchers. Previously, he programmed for Impossible Foods and Google, and has led several EA local groups.
Michael Aird - Associate Researcher
Michael Aird is a Associate Researcher at Rethink Priorities. He has a background in political and cognitive psychology and in teaching. Before joining RP, he conducted longtermist macrostrategy research for Convergence Analysis and the Center on Long-Term Risk.
Administration
Abraham Rowe - Director of Operations
Abraham is the Director of Operations at Rethink Priorities. He previously co-founded and served as the Executive Director of Wild Animal Initiative, and served as the Corporate Campaigns Manager at Mercy For Animals.
Janique Behman - Director of Development
Janique is the Director of Development at Rethink Priorities. She cultivates relationships with major donors and institutional grantmakers and helps us find funders for our new research projects. She previously was in charge of strategy and community-building at Effective Altruism Zurich and interned at EA Geneva. She holds an MBA with a focus on philanthropy advisory services.
Ask Us Anything
Please ask us anything - about the org and how we operate, about the staff, about our research… anything!
You can read more about us in our 2020 Impact and 2021 Strategy EA Forum update or visit our website rethinkpriorities.org.
If you're interested in hearing more, please consider subscribing to our newsletter.
Also, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention that we're currently fundraising! We are funding constrained and have the management capacity and hiring talent pool to grow if given more money. We accept and track restricted funds by cause area if that is of interest.
If you'd like to support our work, you can find donation instructions at https://www.rethinkpriorities.org/donate or you can email Janique at janique@rethinkpriorities.org.
How funding-constrained is your longtermist work, i.e., how much funding have you raised for your 2021 longtermist budget so far, and how much do you expect to be able to deploy usefully, and how much are you short?
Hi Jonas,
Since we last posted our longtermism budget, we've raised ~$89,500 restricted to longtermism for 2021 (with the largest being the grant recommendation from the Survival and Flourishing Fund). This means we will enter 2021 with ~$121K restricted to longtermism not yet spent. Overall, we'd like to raise an additional $403K-$414K for longtermist work by early 2021.
For full transparency - note that, if necessary, we may also choose to use unrestricted funds on longtermism and that this is not factored into these numbers. We currently have ~$273K in unrestricted funds, though we will likely have non-longtermism things we will need to spend this money on.
Given that we are currently just raising money to cover the salaries of our existing longtermist staff (including operations support) as well as start an longtermism intern program, we expect we will be able to deploy longtermist money quickly. We also have a large talent pool of longtermist researchers we likely could hire this year if we ended up with even more longtermism money.
I did internal modeling/forecasting for our fundraising figures, and at least on the first pass it looked like our longtermist work was more likely to be funding constrained than our other priority cause areas, at least if "funding constrained" is narrowly defined as "what's the probability that we do not raise all the money that we'd like for all planned operations to run smoothly."
My main reasoning was somewhat outside-viewy and focused on general uncertainty: our longtermist team is new, and relative to other of Rethink's cause areas, less well-established with less of a track record of either a) prior funding, b) public work other than Luisa's nuclear risk work, or c) a well-vetted research plan. So I'm just generally unsure of these things.
Three major caveats:
1. I did those forecasts in late October and now I think my original figures were too pessimistic.
2. Another caveat is that my predictions were more a reflection of my own uncertainty than a lack of inside view confidence in the team. For context, my 5th-95th percentile credible interval spanned ~an order of magnitude across all cause areas.
3. When making the original numbers, I incorporated but plausibly substantially underrated the degree that the forecasts will change and not just reflect reality. For example, Peter and Marcus may have prioritized different decisions accordingly due to my numbers, or this comment may affect other people's decisions.
Huge fan of the work your team has done, so thank you all for everything! A couple questions :)
1. For potential donors who are particularly interested in wild animal welfare research, how would you describe any key differentiating factors between the approaches of Rethink Priorities and Wild Animal Initiative?
2. For donors who might want to earmark donations to go specifically towards wild animal welfare research within your organization, would this in turn affect the allocation of priority-agnostic donations otherwise made to Rethink? Or is there a way in which such earmarked donations indeed counterfactually support this specific area as opposed to the general areas you cover? (This question applies to most multi-focused orgs.)
3. With respect to invertebrate research, and specifically 'invertebrate sentience', it seems that the sheer number of invertebrates existing would be the driving factor in calculating any expected benefit of pursuing interventions. Are there 'sentience probabilities' low enough to put such an expected value of intervention in question? (I have not thoroughly looked through your publicly available work, so feel free to point to relevant resources if this question has been addressed!)
Thanks in advance for all your thoughts!
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your questions. I'll let Marcus and Peter answer the first two, but I feel qualified to answer the third.
Certainly, the large number of invertebrate animals is an important factor in why we think invertebrate welfare is an area that deserves attention. But I would advise against relying too heavily on numbers alone when assessing the value of promoting invertebrate welfare. There are at least two important considerations worth bearing in mind:
(1) First, among sentient animals, there may be significant differences in capacity for welfare or moral status. If these differences are large enough, they might matter more than the differences in the numbers of different types of animals.
(2) Second, at some point, Pascal's Mugging will rear its ugly head. There may be some point below which we are rationally required to ignore probabilities. It's not clear to me where that point lies. (And it's also not clear that this is the best way to address Pascal's Mugging.) There are about 440 quintillion nematodes alive at any given time, which sounds like a pretty good reason to work on nematode welfare, even if one's credence in their sentience is really low. But nematodes are n... (read more)
Thanks for the questions!
On (1), we see our work in WAW as currently doing three things: (1) foundational research (e.g., understanding moral value and sentience, understanding well-being at various stages of life), (2) investigating plausible tractable interventions (i.e., feasible interventions currently happening or doable within 5 years), and (3) field building and understanding (e.g., currently we are running polls to see how "weird" the public finds WAW interventions).
We generally defer to WAI on matters of direct outreach (both academic and general public) and do not prioritize that area as much as WAI and Animal Ethics do. It's hard to say more on how our vision differs from WAI without them commenting, but we collaborate with them a lot and we are next scheduled to sync on plans and vision in early January.
On (2), it's hard to predict exactly what additional restrict donations do, but in general, we expect them to increase in the long run how much we spend in a cause by an amount similar to how much is donated. Reasons for this include: we budget on a fairly long-term basis, so we generally try to predict what we will spend in a space, and then raise that much funding. If ... (read more)
I’ve been very impressed with your work, and I’m looking forward to you hopefully making similarly impressive contributions to probing longtermism!
But when it comes to questions: You did say “anything,” so may I ask some questions about productivity when it comes to research in particular? Please pick and choose from these to answer any that seem interesting to you.
- Thinking vs. reading. If you want to research a particular topic, how do you balance reading the relevant literature against thinking yourself and recording your thoughts? I’ve heard second-hand that Hilary Greaves recommends thinking first so to be unanchored by the existing literature and the existing approaches to the problem. Another benefit may be that you start out reading the literature with a clearer mental model of the problem, which might make it easier to stay motivated and to remain critical/vigilant while reading. Would you agree or do you have a different approach?
- Self-consciousness. I imagine that virtually any research project, successful and unsuccessful, starts with some inchoate thoughts and notes. These will usually seem hopelessly inadequate but they’ll sometimes mature into something amazingly in
... (read more)I can answer 6, as I’ve been doing it for Wild Animal Welfare since I was hired in September. WAW is a new and small field, so it is relatively easy to learn the field, but there’s still so much! I started by going backwards (into the Welfare Biology movement of the 80s and 90s) and forwards (into the WAW EA orgs we know today) from Brain Tomasik, consulting the primary literature over various specific matters of fact. A great thing about WAW being such a young field (and so concentrated in EA) is that I can reach out to basically anyone who’s published on it and have a real conversation. It’s a big shortcut!
I should note that my background is in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology, so someone else might need a lot more background in those basics if they were to learn WAW.
Hi Denis,
Lots of really good questions here. I’ll do my best to answer.
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... (read more)Thinking vs reading: I think it depends on the context. Sometimes it makes sense to lean toward thinking more and sometimes it makes sense to lean toward reading more. (I wouldn’t advise focusing exclusively on one or the other.) Unjustified anchoring is certainly a worry, but I think reinventing the wheel is also a worry. One could waste two weeks groping toward a solution to a problem that could have been solved in afternoon just by reading the right review article.
Self-consciousness: Yep, I am intimately familiar with hopelessly inchoate thoughts and notes. (I’m not sure I’ve ever completed a project without passing through that stage.) For me at least, the best way to overcome this state is to talk to lots of people. One piece of advice I have for young researchers is to come to terms with sharing your work with people you respect before it’s polished. I’m very grateful to have a large network of collaborators willing to listen to and read my confused ramblings. Feedback at an early stage of a project is often much more valuable than feedback at a later stage.
Is there something interesting here?: Ye
1. Thinking vs. reading.
Another benefit of thinking before reading is that it can help you develop your research skills. Noticing some phenomena and then developing a model to explain it is a super valuable exercise. If it turns out you reproduce something that someone else has already done and published, then great, you’ve gotten experience solving some problem and you’ve shown that you can think through it at least as well as some expert in the field. If it turns out that you have produced something novel then it’s time to see how it compares to existing results in the literature and get feedback on how useful it is.
This said, I think this is more true for theoretical work than applied work, e.g. the value of doing this in philosophy > in theoretical economics > in applied economics. A fair amount of EA-relevant research is summarising and synthesising what the academic literature on some topic finds and it seems pretty difficult to do that by just thinking to yourself!
3. Is there something interesting here?
I mostly try to work out how excited I am by this idea and whether I could see myself still being excited in 6 months, since for me having internal motivation to w... (read more)
#9 Typing speed: I think my own belief is that typing speed is probably less important than you appear to believe, but I care enough about it that I logged 53 minutes of typing practice on keybr this year (usually during moments where I'm otherwise not productive and just want to get "in flow" doing something repetitive), and I suspect I still can productively use another 3-5 hours of typing practice next year even if it trades off against deep work time (and presumably many more hours than that if it does not).
#10 Obvious questions. I suspect that while sometimes ignoring/not noticing "obvious questions/advice" etc is coincidental unforced errors, more often than not there is some form of motivated reasoning going on behind the scenes (eg because this story will invalidate a hypothesis I'm wedded to, because it involves unpleasant tradeoffs, because some beliefs are lower prestige, because it makes the work I do seem less important, etc). I think training myself carefully to notice these things has been helpful, though I suspect I still miss a lot of obvious stuff.
#11 Tiredness, focus, etc..I haven't figured this out yet and am keen to learn from my coworkers and others! Right now I take a lot of caffeine and I suspect if I were more careful about optimization I should be cycling drugs over a weekly basis rather than taking the same one every day (especially a drug like caffeine that has tolerance and withdrawal symptoms).
Thank you!
I can’t speak for the entire organization, but I can talk about what I see as my biggest mistakes since I started working at Rethink Priorities:
- Writing articles about interventions I think are promising and thinking that my work is done once the article is published. Examples are baitfish (see the comment above), fish stocking, rodents farmed for pet snake food. The way I see things now, if I think that something should be done, I should express that opinion very clearly and with fewer caveats, find funders who want to fund it, find activists that want to do it, and connect them. Or something like that. And that is the kind of work I am doing at the moment, even though I think I am much better at writing articles than at doing this.
- Avoiding expressing opinions too much. It’s related to the point above. I think that in the past I was too afraid of writing something that could later turn out to be wrong. Hence, I wrote articles in such a way that sometimes the reader could not even know what I think about a problem I am writing about, how important I think it is in the context of other things, etc. I wanted decision makers to
... (read more)Saulius, just wanted to comment that while I haven't devoted the time to read in detail most of your research, I have noticed and greatly appreciated that you have contributed a LOT of useful knowledge to EAA over the past several years. Yours is a name I've recognized in EAA since its early days. I am glad that you're shifting to express your opinions more strongly so that more action can be taken on all of the wonderful research you've contributed. I've gotten the sense that you take these issues very seriously, are super motivated to address them, and don't get pulled into more trivial things, and I greatly admire and am inspired by you for that.
Re (6), I hope that you can be proud of what you've done and decrease your negative self-talk. Take care of yourself. I'd be curious to hear if meditation ends up helping out with this.
I found this response insightful and feel like it echoes mistakes I've made as well; really appreciate you writing it.
For me it's a lobbying organization against baitfish farming in the U.S. I wrote about the topic two years ago here. Many people complimented me on it but no one did anything. I talked with some funders who said they would be interested in funding someone suitable pursuing this, but I haven’t found who could this be. The main argument against it used to be that the industry is declining. But the recently released aquaculture census suggests that it is no longer declining (see my more recent thoughts on numbers here).
Using fish as live bait is already prohibited in some U.S. states (see the map in Kerr (2012)). Many other states have import and movement restrictions (see this table). It seems that all of this happened due to environmental concerns. And the practice is banned in multiple other countries. To me this shows that it is plausible to make progress on this.
Take a look at this graph I made of the number of animals farmed in the U.S. at any time.
I used yellow and black colours to represent ranges. So for example, I think that there are between 1 billion and (5+1=)6 billion baitifsh farmed in the U.S. at any time. It’s mor... (read more)
Hi Saulius, thank you for your comment! To add some more context, ALI is based in New York, but we indeed have a global team. I'm very glad you're bringing up baitfish. Our focus for 2020 was the creation of the Aquatic Animal Alliance, the drafting of our coalition welfare standards and the launch of our certifier campaign. We've done great progress on all of them, and actually already had our first victory with GlobalGAP (which certifies more than 1% of the global aquaculture market). For next year, we plan on continuing our certifier campaign but also wanted to pursue 2 additional campaigns through the Alliance: lobbying and a fish restocking campaign. On the lobbying front, we've already been active in France and plan to do more work there and at the EU level. Regarding fish restocking, we plan on starting working with US states departments of Fish and Wildlife to get them to adopt some or all of our welfare standards. We have already contacted vets who work at these agencies; and through our producer sentiment roundtables we organized in the fall, we have already found fish restocking producers who also are open to working with us. I'm really glad you bringing up baitfis... (read more)
Contrary to organizations like OPIS, Center for Reducing Suffering, and Center on long-term risk, we don't have reducing extreme suffering set as our only priority. We sometimes work on reducing suffering that may not be classified as extreme (arguably, our work on cage-free hen campaigns fall into this category). And perhaps some other work is not directly about reducing suffering at all. Since preventing extreme suffering is not our only priority, I think that we are unlikely to be the best donation opportunity for this specific goal. That said, when I look at the list of our publications, I think that almost all the articles we write contribute to the goal of preventing needless and extreme suffering in some way, although in many cases it is quite indirect. In the end, we are not able to compare whether or not Rethink Priorities is a better donation opportunity for this purpose than other organizations in an unbiased way.
Thanks for the questions!
I think this depends on many factual beliefs you hold, including what groups of creatures count and what time period you are concerned about. Restricting ourselves to the present and assuming all plausibly sentient minds count (and ignoring extremes, say, less than 0.1% chance), I think farm and wild animals are plausibly candidates for enduring some of the worst suffering.
Specifically, I'd say it's plausible some of the worst persistent current suffering is plausibly in farmed chickens and fish, and thus work to reduce the worst aspects of those is a decent bet to prevent extreme suffering. Similarly, wild animals likely experience the largest share of extreme suffering currently because of the sheer numbers and nature of life largely without interventions to prevent, say, the suffering of starvation, or extreme physical pain. For these reasons, work to improve conditions for wild animals plausibly could be a good investment.
Still restricted to the present, and outside ... (read more)
What are the things you look for when hiring? What are some skills/experiences that you wish more EA applicants had? What separates the "top 5-10%" of EA applicants from the median applicant?
Thanks for the question!
We hire for fairly specific roles, and the difference between those we do hire and don't isn't necessarily as simple as those brought on being better as researchers overall (to say nothing of differences in fit or skill across causes).
That said, we generally prioritize ability in writing, general reasoning, and quantitative skills. That is we value the ability to uncover and address considerations, counter-points, meta-considerations on a topic, produce quantitative models and do data analysis when appropriate (obviously this is more relevant in certain roles than others), and to compile this information into understandable writing that highlights the important features and addresses topics with clarity. However, which combination of these skills is most desired at a given time depends on current team fit and the role each hire would be stepping into.
For these reasons, it's difficult to say with precision which skills I'd hope for more of among EA researchers. With those caveats, I'd still say a demonstration of these skills through producing high quality work, be it academic or in blog posts, is in fact a useful proxy for the kinds of work we do at RP.
What would you do if Rethink Priorities had significantly more money? (Eg, 2x or 10x your current budget)
Hi Neel,
We'd obviously be very excited to take 10x our budget if you're offering ;)
Right now, 10x our budget would be ~$14M, which would still be 8x smaller than large think tanks like the Brookings Institution. I think if we had 10x the budget, the main thing we would do is expand our research staff as rapidly as non-financial constraints (e.g., management, operations, and team culture) allow.
There are definitely many more areas of research we could be working in, both within our existing cause areas (currently farmed animal welfare, wild animal welfare, invertebrate welfare, longtermism, and EA movement building) and other cause areas we aren't working in yet. We'd also need more operations staff and management to facilitate this.
As for specific research questions, I think we have a much clearer vision of what we would do with 2x the money than 10x the money. I personally (speaking for myself not the rest of the org) would love to see us hire staff to work more directly on farmed animal welfare policy and to investigate meat alternatives, do much more to understand EA community health and movement building, do more fundamental research (e.g., like our work on moral weight and inv... (read more)
You mentioned in your 2021 update that you're starting a research internship program next year (contingent on more funding) in order to identify and train talented researchers, and therefore contribute to EA-aligned research efforts (including your own).
Besides offering similar internships, what do you think other EA orgs could do to contribute to these goals? What do you think individuals could do to become skilled in this kind of research and become competitive for these jobs?
Hi Arushi,
I am very hopeful the internship program will let us identify, take on, and train many more staff than we could otherwise and then either hire them directly or be able to recommend them to other organizations.
While I am wary of recommending unpaid labor (that's why our internship is paid), I otherwise think one of the best ways for a would-be researcher to distinguish themselves is writing a thoughtful and engaging EA Forum post. I've seen a lot of great hires distinguish themselves like this.
Other than open more researcher jobs and internships, I think other EA orgs could perhaps contribute by writing advice and guides about research processes or by offering more "behind the scenes" content on how different research is. done.
Lastly, in my personal opinion, I think we should also do more to create an EA culture where people don't feel like the only way they can contribute is as a researcher. I think the role gets a lot more glamor than it deserves and many people can contribute a lot from earning to give, working in academia, working in politics, working in a non-EA think tank, etc.
I’m happy to see an increase in the number of temporary visiting researcher positions at various EA orgs. I found my time visiting GPI during their Early Career Conference Programme very valuable (hint: applications for 2021 are now open, apply!) and would encourage other orgs to run similar sorts of programmes to this and FHI’s (summer) research scholars programme. I'm very excited to see how our internship program develops as I really enjoy mentoring.
I think I was competitive for the RP job because of my T-shaped skills, broad knowledge in lots of EA-related things but also specialised knowledge in a specific useful area, economics in my case. Michael Aird probably has the most to say about developing broad knowledge given how much EA content he has consumed in the last couple of years, but in general reading things on the Forum and actively discussing them with other people (perhaps in a reading group) seems to be the way to develop in this area. Developing specialised skills obviously depends a lot on the skill, but graduate education and relevant internships are the most obvious routes here.
There are some relevant answers in here and here.
Conditional on invertibrates being sentient, I would upgrade my probability of other things being sentient. So maybe bivales are sentient, some existing robots, maybe even plants. I would take the case for hidden qualia in humans seriously as well. Do you agree, and if so, would this have any impact on good policies to pursue?
Hi Roger,
There are different possible scenarios in which invertebrates turn out to be sentient. It might be the case, for instance, that panpsychism is true. So if one comes to believe that invertebrates are sentient because panpsychism is true, one should also come to believe that robots and plants are sentient. Or it could be that some form of information integration theory is true, and invertebrates instantiate enough integration for sentience. In that case, the probability that you assign to the sentience of plants and robots will depend on your assessment of their relevant level of integration.
For what it's worth, here's how I think about the issue: sentience, like other biological properties, has an evolutionary function. I take it as a datum that mammals are sentient. If we can discern the role that sentience is playing in mammals, and it appears there is analogous behavior in other taxa, then, in the absence of defeaters, we are licensed to infer that individuals of those taxa are sentient. In the past few years I've updated toward thinking that arthropods and (coleoid) cephalopods are sentient, but the majority of these updates have been based on learning new empirical inf... (read more)
Regarding the following research areas for 2021:
Hi Vaidehi,
I will be working on both of these projects with David Moss. Our plan is to run surveys of the general public that describe EA (or longtermism) and ask questions to gauge how people view the message. We'd then experimentally change the message to explore how different framings change support, with the idea that messages that engender more support on the survey are likely to be more successful overall. For EA messaging, we'd furthermore look at support broken down by different demographics to see if there are more inclusive messages out there. We did a similar project we did for animal welfare messaging on live shackle slaughter, which you can look at to get a sense of what we do. We also have a lot of unpublished animal welfare messaging work we're eager to get out there as soon as we can.
~
As you know, we do run the EA Survey and Local Groups Survey. Right now, our main goal is to stay within analysis of EA movement building rather than work to directly build... (read more)
If you had to choose just three long-termist efforts as the highest expected value, which would you pick and why?
(Speaking for myself and not others on the team, etc)
At a very high level, I think I have mostly "mainstream longtermist EA" views here, and my current best guess would be that AI Safety, existential biosecurity, and cause prioritization (broadly construed) are the highest EV efforts to work on overall, object-level.
This does not necessarily mean that marginal progress on these things are the best use of additional resources, or that they are the most cost-effective efforts to work on, of course.
How do you decide how to allocate research time between cause areas (e.g. animals vs x-risk)?
In this report on bottlenecks in the X-risk research community, the main suggestion was to improve the senior researcher pipeline. What do you think about the senior researcher pipeline in prioritization research?
I think it would always be good to have more senior researchers, but they seem rather hard to find. Right now, my personal view is that the best way to build senior researchers is to hire and train mid-level or junior-level researchers. We hope to keep doing this with our past hires, existing hires, and our upcoming intern program.
If you're interested in funding researcher talent development, I think funding our intern program is a very competitive opportunity.
Do you think that you have received valuable feedback on your work by posting it on the forum? If you did, did most of it come from people in your existing network?
Hey Edo,
I definitely receive valuable feedback on my work by posting it on the Forum, and the feedback is often most valuable when it comes from people outside my current network. For me, the best example of this dynamic was when Gavin Taylor left extensive comments on our series of posts about features relevant to invertebrate sentience (here, here, and here) back in June 2019. I had never interacted with Gavin before, but because of his comments, we set up a meeting, and he has become an invaluable collaborator across many different projects. My work is much improved due to his insights. I'm not sure Gavin and I would ever have met (much less collaborated) if not for his comments on the Forum.
Have you had experience with using volunteers or outsourcing questions to the broad EA community? How was it?
I did try it on some occasions with people who wanted to do research similar to the kind of research that I do. I think that it saved me less time than the time it took me to think of good questions to outsource and explain everything, and so on. This might be partly because there is a skill in outsourcing that I haven't mastered yet. I don't know if it helped anyone to decide whether they should pursue this type of career. If it did, then it was very much worth it.
One way I used volunteers (and friends whom I forced to volunteer) productively was making them read texts that I wrote and asking to comment aloud (not in writing) on everything that is at least slightly unclear. Then I didn't explain, but rewrote that part, and asked them to read again and asked if they understand it now. I found that this is important for texts that contain some complicated ideas/reasoning. E.g., it was very useful for the explanation of optimizer's curse and other things in this article. Not important for simple texts.
How do you manage research questions? Do you have some sort of an internal list of relevant questions? I'd also love to hear about specific examples of decisions to pursue or discard a research question.
What are some possible efforts within prioritization research that is outside your scope and you'd like to see more of?
How does your cooperation with other prioritization research groups look like? What do you think are the biggest bottlenecks in prioritization research as a field?
How's having two executive directors going?
In the following comment, Marcus wrote:
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