Ask Rethink Priorities Anything (AMA)

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.