Hi Elizabeth,

I represent Rethink Priorities but the incubator Charlie is referencing was/is run by Charity Entrepreneurship, which is a different and fully separate org. So you would have to ask them.

If there are any of your questions you'd want me to answer with reference to Rethink Priorities, let me know!

Hi Charlie,

Peter Wildeford from Rethink Priorities here. I think about this sort of thing a lot. I'm disappointed in your cheating but appreciate your honesty and feedback.

We've considered many times about using a time verification system and even tried it once. But it was a pretty stressful experience for applicants since the timer then required the entire task to be done in one sitting. The system we used also introduced some logistical difficulty on our end.

We'd like to try to make things as easy for our applicants as possible since it's already such a stressful experience. At the same time, we don't want to incentivize cheating or make people feel like they have to cheat to stay ahead. It's a difficult trade-off. But so far I think it's been working -- we've been hiring a lot of honest and high integrity people that I trust greatly and don't feel like I need a timer to micromanage them.

More recently, we've been experimenting with more explicit honor code statements. We've also done more to pre-test all our work tests to ensure the time limits are reasonable and practical. We'll continue to think and experiment around this and I'm very open to feedback from you or others about how to do this better.

Yes. I think animal welfare remains incredibly understudied and thus it is easier to have a novel insight, but also there is less literature to draw from and you can end up more fundamentally clueless. Whereas in global health and development work there is much more research to draw from, which makes it nicer to be able to do literature reviews to turn existing studies and evidence into grant recommendations, but also means that a lot of the low-hanging fruit has been done already.

Similarly, there is a lot more money available to chase top global health interventions relative to animal welfare or x-risk work, but it is also comparably harder to improve recommendations as a lot of the recommendations are already pretty well-known by foundations and policymakers.

AI has been an especially interesting place to work in because it has been rapidly mainstreaming this year. Previously, there was not much to draw on but now there is much more to draw from and many more people are open to being advised on work in the area. However, there are also many more people trying to get involved and work is being produced at a very rapid pace, which can make it harder to keep up and harder to contribute.

I think it varies a lot by cause area but I think you would be unsurprised to hear me recommend more marginal thinking/research. I think we’re still pretty far from understanding how to best allocate a doing/action portfolio and there’d still be sizable returns from thinking more.

• I like pop music, like Ariana Grande and Olivia Rodriguo, though Taylor Swift is the Greatest of All Time. I went to the Eras Tour and loved it.

• I have strong opinions about the multiple types of pizza.

• I'm nowhere near as good at coming up with takes and opinions off-the-cuff in verbal conversations as I am in writing. I'm 10x smarter when I have access to the internet.

(1) where do you think forecasting has its best use-cases? where do you think forecasting doesn't help, or could hurt?

I'm actually surprisingly unsure about this, especially given how interested I am in forecasting. I think when it comes to actual institutional decision making it is pretty rare for forecasts to be used in very decision-relevant ways and a lot of the challenge comes from asking the right questions in advance rather than the actual skill of creating a good forecast. And a lot of the solutions proposed can be expensive, overengineered, and focus far too much on forecasting and not enough on the initial question writing. Michael Story gets into this well in "Why I generally don't recommend internal prediction markets or forecasting tournaments to organisations".

I think something like "Can Policymakers Trust Forecasters?" from the Institute for Progress takes a healthier view about how to use forecasting. Basically, you need to take some humility about what forecasting can accomplish but explicit quantification of your views is a good thing and it is also really good for society generally to grade experts on their accuracy rather than their ability to manipulate the media system.

Additionally, I do think that knowing about the world ahead seems generally valuable and forecasting still seems like one of the best ways to do that. For example, everything we know about existential risk essentially comes down to various kinds of forecasting.

Lastly, my guess is that a lot of the potential of forecasting for institutional decision making is still untapped and merits further meta-research and exploration.

(2) what are RP's plans with the Special Projects Program?

The plan for RP Special Projects is to continue to fiscally sponsor our existing portfolio of organizations and see how that goes and continue to build capacity to support additional organizations sometime in the future. Current marginal Special Projects time is going into exploring more incubation work with our Existential Security department.

Do you think that promoting alternative proteins is (by far) the most tractable way to make conventional animal agriculture obsolete?

Evidence for alternative proteins being the most tractable way to make conventional animal agriculture obsolete is fairly weak. For example, similar products (eg, plant-based milk, margarine) have not made their respective categories obsolete.

Instead, we do have and we will continue to need a multi-pronged approach to transitioning conventional animal agriculture to a more just and humane system.

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Do you think increasing public funding and support for alternative proteins is the most pressing challenge facing the industry?

Alternative proteins is a varied landscape so I imagine that the bottlenecks will be pretty different depending on the particular product, company, and approach. Unfortunately I am not up to date on details with regard to the funding gaps in this area.

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Do you think there is expert consensus on these questions?

Unfortunately there is not. There also just aren't that many experts in this area in the first place.

Honestly I love this question but I got asked a lot of real questions that I think were varied and challenging, so right now I don't currently feel like I need even more!

What do you focus on within civilizational resilience?

This year we’ve made an intentional decision to focus nearly all our longtermist work on AI due to our assessment of AI risk as both unusually large and urgent, even among other existential risks. We will revisit this decision in future years and to be clear this does not mean that we think other people shouldn’t work on non-AI x-risk or longtermism-work not oriented towards existential risk reduction. But that does mean we don’t have any current work on civilizational resilience right now.

That being said, we do have some work on this in the past:

• Linch did a decent amount of research and coordination work around exploring civilizational refuges but RP is no longer working on this project.

• Jam has previously done work on far-UVC, for example by contributing to "Air Safety to Combat Global Catastrophic Biorisks".

• We co-supported Luisa in writing "What is the likelihood that civilizational collapse would directly lead to human extinction (within decades)?" while she was a researcher at both Rethink Priorities and Forethought Foundation.