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?
What new charities do you want to be created by EAs?
What are the biggest mistakes Rethink Priorities did?
What are the biggest mistakes Rethink Priorities did?
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 my articles and form their own opinions based on what I said. I now think that this is not ideal because decision makers may not have the time to form nuanced opinions based on subtle details in my long articles. But someone has to form actionable opinions, and it is me who has the context and the time for that. So I want to try to write more articles of the “This is what I think you should do and I’m going to explain why” type, rather than the “Here is a 40 page summary of everything I’ve ever read on this topic” type. I sometimes want to write articles of the former type because then my managers, funders and myself can all clearly see what I’ve been working on for all this time. But my end goal is making an impact so I try to not think about that too much. Note that if I pledged to only ever write articles that are purely of the former kind, I might end up not writing a single paragraph all year. I don’t think I should go that far.
Spending too much time on finishing articles that I know won’t have that much impact. In some cases, it’s better to just drop them, admit to yourself that you wasted some time, and move on to the next project. That said, there were some articles that I had strongly considered abandoning, but in the end I was happy I finished them.
Spending any time on details that I know right away won’t be that important. There are some examples of this in Estimates of global captive vertebrate numbers article. Did I really need to write about pets, civet farming, and other relatively minor problems that I know effective altruists won’t work on? I guess I wanted the list to be complete, but I don’t know why. It wasted not only my time, but also the time and the attention of the readers.
Being too frugal. In the beginning of working at Rethink Priorities, I wanted to either take a low salary, or spend as little money as I can and donate the rest. But the problems that it caused made me less productive and possibly decreased my impact. Now I allow myself to spend more and I think I’m better off because of it.
Not doing more to address some of my productivity problems, especially negative self-talk about myself and my work. Almost every day I hate myself for not doing enough work. It is exhausting, and it tires me out more quickly and hence I become even less productive. I still haven’t found a good way to deal with it. I tried therapy multiple times but I never emphasized this specific issue so that is on my to-do list. I also want to try more meditation, maybe that can help.
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.
What new charities do you want to be created by EAs?
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 more likely to be closer to 1 billion than to 6 billion though. Still, if we wanted to decrease the number of vertebrates farmed for the U.S. consumption by say 500 million, it would seem very difficult to make Americans decrease their chicken and egg consumption by 25%, or decrease their farmed fish consumption by 13%-42%. Decreasing baitfish production by a 500 million might also be difficult but I think it is much more easily achievable.
I am doing a bit more research on this right now (in parallel with other projects), and I might make another EA forum post about it at some point but I don’t know if that is what is needed to make this happen. I think that at this point someone should just try to do it.
If anyone is interested, please schedule a meeting with me here or write to me at saulius at rethinkpriorities dot org .
Maybe Aquatic Life Institute or Fish Welfare Initiative would work on this. I’m not sure if they’re already aware. I think it would be closer to ALI’s work.
Thanks for suggestions Micheal. Haven from FWI is actually helping me to do research on this in his free time. He said that FWI would be open to putting someone who would work on this under their organization if given funding, but not to redirecting the time of the current staff towards the project. This makes sense because they want to continue with the work that they have started doing, and they are not experts on lobbying and I think few if any of them are located in the U.S. I haven’t talked about this with ALI yet (you are right, I should), but from what I hear, I think that they also don’t have expertise in U.S. lobbying, are mostly not located in the U.S., and would probably not want to redirect current staff time to new projects. I don’t know how much previous lobbying experience is important here but my sense is that it is. I feel that what is needed is a person (or two) who would be suitable for leading this, and then we could figure out all the organizational and funding stuff.
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 baitfish, because we were not planning to focus on it, but you make a compelling case, I would love to follow up on that. That being said, it’s also true that we are running a tight ship, so it will also depending on funding, the interest of the other Alliance members and the progress of our certifier campaign. If you have any questions about the Aquatic Life Institute, the Aquatic Animal Alliance, or any of the work we are currently doing please reach out to us at kiara@ali.fish. We hope to share more of our research pieces and accomplishments very shortly!
Thank you very much William for your comment! I will follow up with you in private but there are few things that I thought would be suitable to say/ask here as well.
It was very recently brought to my attention that baitfish seems to also be farmed in France and that there is an animal advocacy organization that has a petition on it (see here and here). I don’t know what is the scale of baitfish farming in France or in any country other than the U.S., so I don’t yet know if it is an issue I would recommend tackling in France. I just thought I should mention that in case you or someone else could be interested in doing some lobbying on this issue there.
Also, at Rethink Priorities we try to track any possible impact we had on the projects of animal welfare organizations. So I wanted to ask, do you think you would have worked on fish restocking if this article was never written? And please don’t hesitate to say that you knew about the industry and its size independently of that article and it had nothing to do with it, if that is the case :)
Thanks Saulius, it actually so happens that the organization running the baitfish petition in France, Paris Animaux Zoopolis, was founded by Amandine Sanvisens… who is also the director of ALI in France! But, and that goes to your next point, we were not aware of the relative scale of baitfish farming; so if we do end up prioritizing it over another intervention, the credit for the additional impact of doing that campaign over the one we would have done otherwise would go to you and RP! Would love to chat more and we’ll keep you updated.
Good to know. I’ve talked to Gautier who wrote the French article I linked to, and he said he had already tried to figure out the scale of the industry in France, but didn’t manage to find stats on it. However, he said that there are indications that it is a small industry compared to the U.S. He said there was work on it mostly due to legal precedent reasons rather than direct impact.
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?
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.
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 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 the typical EA space altogether, I think it’s plausible much of the worst suffering in the world is committed during war crimes or torture under various authoritarian states. I do not know if there’s anything remotely tractable in this space or what good donation opportunities would be.
If you broaden consideration to include the future, a much wider set of creatures plausibly could experience extreme suffering including digital minds running at higher speeds, and/or with increased intensity of valenced experience beyond what’s currently possible in biological creatures. Here, what you think is the best bet would depend on many empirical beliefs again. I would say, only, that I’m excited about our longtermism work and think we’ll meaningfully contribute to creating the kind of future that decreases the risks of these types of outcomes.
What new charities do you want to be created by EAs?
I don’t have any strong opinions about this and it would likely take months of work to develop them. In general, I don’t know enough to suggest that it is desirable that new charities work in areas I think could use more work rather than existing organizations up their work in those domains.
What are the biggest mistakes Rethink Priorities did?
Not doing enough early enough to figure out how to achieve impact from our work and communicate with other organizations and funders about how we can work together.
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 :)
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?
What new charities do you want to be created by EAs?
What are the biggest mistakes Rethink Priorities did?
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 my articles and form their own opinions based on what I said. I now think that this is not ideal because decision makers may not have the time to form nuanced opinions based on subtle details in my long articles. But someone has to form actionable opinions, and it is me who has the context and the time for that. So I want to try to write more articles of the “This is what I think you should do and I’m going to explain why” type, rather than the “Here is a 40 page summary of everything I’ve ever read on this topic” type. I sometimes want to write articles of the former type because then my managers, funders and myself can all clearly see what I’ve been working on for all this time. But my end goal is making an impact so I try to not think about that too much. Note that if I pledged to only ever write articles that are purely of the former kind, I might end up not writing a single paragraph all year. I don’t think I should go that far.
Spending too much time on finishing articles that I know won’t have that much impact. In some cases, it’s better to just drop them, admit to yourself that you wasted some time, and move on to the next project. That said, there were some articles that I had strongly considered abandoning, but in the end I was happy I finished them.
Spending any time on details that I know right away won’t be that important. There are some examples of this in Estimates of global captive vertebrate numbers article. Did I really need to write about pets, civet farming, and other relatively minor problems that I know effective altruists won’t work on? I guess I wanted the list to be complete, but I don’t know why. It wasted not only my time, but also the time and the attention of the readers.
Being too frugal. In the beginning of working at Rethink Priorities, I wanted to either take a low salary, or spend as little money as I can and donate the rest. But the problems that it caused made me less productive and possibly decreased my impact. Now I allow myself to spend more and I think I’m better off because of it.
Not doing more to address some of my productivity problems, especially negative self-talk about myself and my work. Almost every day I hate myself for not doing enough work. It is exhausting, and it tires me out more quickly and hence I become even less productive. I still haven’t found a good way to deal with it. I tried therapy multiple times but I never emphasized this specific issue so that is on my to-do list. I also want to try more meditation, maybe that can help.
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 more likely to be closer to 1 billion than to 6 billion though. Still, if we wanted to decrease the number of vertebrates farmed for the U.S. consumption by say 500 million, it would seem very difficult to make Americans decrease their chicken and egg consumption by 25%, or decrease their farmed fish consumption by 13%-42%. Decreasing baitfish production by a 500 million might also be difficult but I think it is much more easily achievable.
I am doing a bit more research on this right now (in parallel with other projects), and I might make another EA forum post about it at some point but I don’t know if that is what is needed to make this happen. I think that at this point someone should just try to do it.
If anyone is interested, please schedule a meeting with me here or write to me at saulius at rethinkpriorities dot org .
Maybe Aquatic Life Institute or Fish Welfare Initiative would work on this. I’m not sure if they’re already aware. I think it would be closer to ALI’s work.
Thanks for suggestions Micheal. Haven from FWI is actually helping me to do research on this in his free time. He said that FWI would be open to putting someone who would work on this under their organization if given funding, but not to redirecting the time of the current staff towards the project. This makes sense because they want to continue with the work that they have started doing, and they are not experts on lobbying and I think few if any of them are located in the U.S. I haven’t talked about this with ALI yet (you are right, I should), but from what I hear, I think that they also don’t have expertise in U.S. lobbying, are mostly not located in the U.S., and would probably not want to redirect current staff time to new projects. I don’t know how much previous lobbying experience is important here but my sense is that it is. I feel that what is needed is a person (or two) who would be suitable for leading this, and then we could figure out all the organizational and funding stuff.
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 baitfish, because we were not planning to focus on it, but you make a compelling case, I would love to follow up on that. That being said, it’s also true that we are running a tight ship, so it will also depending on funding, the interest of the other Alliance members and the progress of our certifier campaign. If you have any questions about the Aquatic Life Institute, the Aquatic Animal Alliance, or any of the work we are currently doing please reach out to us at kiara@ali.fish. We hope to share more of our research pieces and accomplishments very shortly!
Thank you very much William for your comment! I will follow up with you in private but there are few things that I thought would be suitable to say/ask here as well.
It was very recently brought to my attention that baitfish seems to also be farmed in France and that there is an animal advocacy organization that has a petition on it (see here and here). I don’t know what is the scale of baitfish farming in France or in any country other than the U.S., so I don’t yet know if it is an issue I would recommend tackling in France. I just thought I should mention that in case you or someone else could be interested in doing some lobbying on this issue there.
Also, at Rethink Priorities we try to track any possible impact we had on the projects of animal welfare organizations. So I wanted to ask, do you think you would have worked on fish restocking if this article was never written? And please don’t hesitate to say that you knew about the industry and its size independently of that article and it had nothing to do with it, if that is the case :)
Thanks Saulius, it actually so happens that the organization running the baitfish petition in France, Paris Animaux Zoopolis, was founded by Amandine Sanvisens… who is also the director of ALI in France! But, and that goes to your next point, we were not aware of the relative scale of baitfish farming; so if we do end up prioritizing it over another intervention, the credit for the additional impact of doing that campaign over the one we would have done otherwise would go to you and RP! Would love to chat more and we’ll keep you updated.
Good to know. I’ve talked to Gautier who wrote the French article I linked to, and he said he had already tried to figure out the scale of the industry in France, but didn’t manage to find stats on it. However, he said that there are indications that it is a small industry compared to the U.S. He said there was work on it mostly due to legal precedent reasons rather than direct impact.
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 the typical EA space altogether, I think it’s plausible much of the worst suffering in the world is committed during war crimes or torture under various authoritarian states. I do not know if there’s anything remotely tractable in this space or what good donation opportunities would be.
If you broaden consideration to include the future, a much wider set of creatures plausibly could experience extreme suffering including digital minds running at higher speeds, and/or with increased intensity of valenced experience beyond what’s currently possible in biological creatures. Here, what you think is the best bet would depend on many empirical beliefs again. I would say, only, that I’m excited about our longtermism work and think we’ll meaningfully contribute to creating the kind of future that decreases the risks of these types of outcomes.
I don’t have any strong opinions about this and it would likely take months of work to develop them. In general, I don’t know enough to suggest that it is desirable that new charities work in areas I think could use more work rather than existing organizations up their work in those domains.
Not doing enough early enough to figure out how to achieve impact from our work and communicate with other organizations and funders about how we can work together.
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 :)