If one is only concerned w/ preventing needless suffering, prioritising the most extreme suffering, would donating to Rethink Priorities be a good investment for them, and if so, how so?
I like the answers Marcus and Saulius gave to this question. I’ll just add two things those answers didn’t explicitly mention.
EA movement-building
Rethink has done and plans to do work aimed at improving efforts to build the EA movement and promote EA ideas
“Further refining messaging for the EA movement, exploring different ways of talking about EA to improve EA recruitment and increase diversity.
Further work to explore better ways to talk about longtermism to the general public, to help EAs communicate longtermism more persuasively and to increase support for desired longtermist policies in the US and the UK.”
And building the EA movement and promoting EA ideas seems like plausibly one of the best interventions for reducing needless/extreme/all suffering
E.g., building the EA movement could increase the flows of talent and funds to existing suffering-focused EA organisations (such as CLR), lead to the creation of new ones, or lead to talented people using their careers to effectively reduce suffering in other ways (e.g., through specific roles in government or AI labs)
E.g., promoting EA ideas (even without “building the EA movement”) could lead to a general shift in voting, policies, behaviours towards reducing suffering
Forecasting
Rethink plans to “Use novel econometric methods to better understand our ability to reliably impact the long-term future”, as well as to “Improve our ability to forecast the short-term and long-term future.”
Improving our ability to forecast events and impacts, and improving our understanding of when and how much to trust forecasts, would presumably be about as useful for reducing suffering as for all other efforts to improve the world. (And I think it’d plausibly be very useful for such efforts.)
This seems especially true in relation to:
efforts to reduce suffering in the long-term future, and
decisions about how much to focus on reducing suffering in the long-term future vs reducing suffering in the nearer term.
Caveats
I’m not necessarily arguing that Rethink is where someone should donate if they wish to reduce suffering. That would depend on things like precisely how effective Rethink’s movement-building work would be for EA movement-building, precisely how useful EA movement-building is for reducing suffering, etc.
I’m not in a good position to make those judgements, for reasons including that:
I don’t take a primarily suffering-focused perspective myself (so I haven’t thought about it a great deal—though I did work at the Center on Long-Term Risk for 3 months)
I now work for Rethink, so I might be biased
I’ve only worked at Rethink for a month, and don’t work on the EA movement-building or forecasting stuff myself
But hopefully this is useful food for thought anyway :)
I like the answers Marcus and Saulius gave to this question. I’ll just add two things those answers didn’t explicitly mention.
EA movement-building
Rethink has done and plans to do work aimed at improving efforts to build the EA movement and promote EA ideas
E.g., Rethink’s work on the EA Survey, or its plans related to:
“Further refining messaging for the EA movement, exploring different ways of talking about EA to improve EA recruitment and increase diversity.
Further work to explore better ways to talk about longtermism to the general public, to help EAs communicate longtermism more persuasively and to increase support for desired longtermist policies in the US and the UK.”
And building the EA movement and promoting EA ideas seems like plausibly one of the best interventions for reducing needless/extreme/all suffering
E.g., building the EA movement could increase the flows of talent and funds to existing suffering-focused EA organisations (such as CLR), lead to the creation of new ones, or lead to talented people using their careers to effectively reduce suffering in other ways (e.g., through specific roles in government or AI labs)
E.g., promoting EA ideas (even without “building the EA movement”) could lead to a general shift in voting, policies, behaviours towards reducing suffering
Forecasting
Rethink plans to “Use novel econometric methods to better understand our ability to reliably impact the long-term future”, as well as to “Improve our ability to forecast the short-term and long-term future.”
Improving our ability to forecast events and impacts, and improving our understanding of when and how much to trust forecasts, would presumably be about as useful for reducing suffering as for all other efforts to improve the world. (And I think it’d plausibly be very useful for such efforts.)
This seems especially true in relation to:
efforts to reduce suffering in the long-term future, and
decisions about how much to focus on reducing suffering in the long-term future vs reducing suffering in the nearer term.
Caveats
I’m not necessarily arguing that Rethink is where someone should donate if they wish to reduce suffering. That would depend on things like precisely how effective Rethink’s movement-building work would be for EA movement-building, precisely how useful EA movement-building is for reducing suffering, etc.
I’m not in a good position to make those judgements, for reasons including that:
I don’t take a primarily suffering-focused perspective myself (so I haven’t thought about it a great deal—though I did work at the Center on Long-Term Risk for 3 months)
I now work for Rethink, so I might be biased
I’ve only worked at Rethink for a month, and don’t work on the EA movement-building or forecasting stuff myself
But hopefully this is useful food for thought anyway :)