How do you think about your role as a research organization working across different cause areas?
Personally, I have considered donating to Rethink Priorities. But I care a lot about capacity-building with organizations, so I tend to donate to the other animal welfare EA research organizations such as Animal Charity Evaluators and Sentience Institute. My impression is that while RP is currently focused on animal welfare, a substantial part of the impact of my donations might spillover too much into cause areas that are personally less of a priority to me, such as x-risk and global poverty.
Of course there may be benefits to working across different cause areas, such as the ability to learn methodologies and data from one issue that have relevance to another. So it’s not at all clear how this shakes out, even for supporters who focus on one cause area. What do you think?
Currently, our funding gap through the end of 2021 is $1.79M overall. This consists of gaps of $1.27M for animal research, $337k for longtermism research, and $177k for meta / other research respectively. We do accept and track restricted funds by cause area if that is of interest.
Even if you gave unrestricted funding, most of it (70%, if they allocate funding proportionally) would likely end up in research for animals, anyway. With unrestricted funding, if you think donating to the other orgs is at most ~70% as cost-effective as donating to RP, it’s worth donating to RP, but I also don’t think a factor of 0.7 should really sway your donations, given how much uncertainty we should have, anyway.
Unrestricted funding would not necessarily be spent proportionately across the totality of our budget. If, as is currently the case, we have raised a greater percentage of our gap for animals than non-animals, unrestricted funding could, for example, go mostly to non-animals. However, it is still the case that animal-restricted funding would cause us to do more animal-focused research than we otherwise would.
How do you allocate your unrestricted funding in response to restricted donations? E.g., if someone donates $5K to animal welfare, will the proportion of unrestricted funding going to animal welfare stay roughly the same, or decrease slightly (or increase)?
My guess from your comments are to:
1. allocate restricted funding first, and then
2. decide based on the remaining gaps where to allocate unrestricted funding.
You wrote in another comment “100% of any animal-specific funding is always 100% spent on pro-animal research”. This could indeed apply to 1, but once we consider 2, would it still be the case that $X to animals means $X more dollars spent on animals? Wouldn’t it end up being less because you’ll allocate less of the unrestricted funding in 2 to animals?
We in fact do (1) then (2). However, to continue your example, donations to animal work still end up going to animals. If it were the case, say, that we hit the animal total needed for 2020 before the overall total, additional animal donations would go to animal work for 2021.*
It is true in this scenario that in 2020 we’d end up spending less unrestricted funding on animals, but the total spent on animals that year wouldn’t change and the animal donations for 2020 would not then be spent on non-animal work.
*We would very much state publicly when we have no more room for further donations in general, and by cause area.
That sounds broadly correct, but just for clarification, my question was about capacity-building impact, not current spending and research output. For example, RP funding contributes to the research experience of their staff, and RP staff might be considerably less likely to stay in the animal welfare cause area than researchers at other animal charities. So there might be more spillover of this long-term impact than is reflected in the current budget breakdown.
This is especially likely if RP itself shifts its funding allocation in the future.
We welcome cause-specific donations. 100% of any animal-specific funding is always 100% spent on pro-animal research. Many of our grants have been restricted by cause (for animals, longtermism, or meta work).
We do think there are a lot of benefits to working across causes and there is a lot of transfer of knowledge. For example, quantitative methods used in global health and economic development apply very well to analyzing animal-focused interventions. Additionally, work on animal-focused policy informs our approach to longtermist-focused policy and vice-versa. We think a good amount of our impact as a research organization could come from uncovering these cross-cause insights.
How do you think about your role as a research organization working across different cause areas?
Personally, I have considered donating to Rethink Priorities. But I care a lot about capacity-building with organizations, so I tend to donate to the other animal welfare EA research organizations such as Animal Charity Evaluators and Sentience Institute. My impression is that while RP is currently focused on animal welfare, a substantial part of the impact of my donations might spillover too much into cause areas that are personally less of a priority to me, such as x-risk and global poverty.
Of course there may be benefits to working across different cause areas, such as the ability to learn methodologies and data from one issue that have relevance to another. So it’s not at all clear how this shakes out, even for supporters who focus on one cause area. What do you think?
(I have no formal ties to RP.)
FWIW,
Even if you gave unrestricted funding, most of it (70%, if they allocate funding proportionally) would likely end up in research for animals, anyway. With unrestricted funding, if you think donating to the other orgs is at most ~70% as cost-effective as donating to RP, it’s worth donating to RP, but I also don’t think a factor of 0.7 should really sway your donations, given how much uncertainty we should have, anyway.
Unrestricted funding would not necessarily be spent proportionately across the totality of our budget. If, as is currently the case, we have raised a greater percentage of our gap for animals than non-animals, unrestricted funding could, for example, go mostly to non-animals. However, it is still the case that animal-restricted funding would cause us to do more animal-focused research than we otherwise would.
How do you allocate your unrestricted funding in response to restricted donations? E.g., if someone donates $5K to animal welfare, will the proportion of unrestricted funding going to animal welfare stay roughly the same, or decrease slightly (or increase)?
My guess from your comments are to:
1. allocate restricted funding first, and then
2. decide based on the remaining gaps where to allocate unrestricted funding.
You wrote in another comment “100% of any animal-specific funding is always 100% spent on pro-animal research”. This could indeed apply to 1, but once we consider 2, would it still be the case that $X to animals means $X more dollars spent on animals? Wouldn’t it end up being less because you’ll allocate less of the unrestricted funding in 2 to animals?
We in fact do (1) then (2). However, to continue your example, donations to animal work still end up going to animals. If it were the case, say, that we hit the animal total needed for 2020 before the overall total, additional animal donations would go to animal work for 2021.*
It is true in this scenario that in 2020 we’d end up spending less unrestricted funding on animals, but the total spent on animals that year wouldn’t change and the animal donations for 2020 would not then be spent on non-animal work.
*We would very much state publicly when we have no more room for further donations in general, and by cause area.
That sounds broadly correct, but just for clarification, my question was about capacity-building impact, not current spending and research output. For example, RP funding contributes to the research experience of their staff, and RP staff might be considerably less likely to stay in the animal welfare cause area than researchers at other animal charities. So there might be more spillover of this long-term impact than is reflected in the current budget breakdown.
This is especially likely if RP itself shifts its funding allocation in the future.
Ah, my mistake. This is an interesting consideration.
We welcome cause-specific donations. 100% of any animal-specific funding is always 100% spent on pro-animal research. Many of our grants have been restricted by cause (for animals, longtermism, or meta work).
We do think there are a lot of benefits to working across causes and there is a lot of transfer of knowledge. For example, quantitative methods used in global health and economic development apply very well to analyzing animal-focused interventions. Additionally, work on animal-focused policy informs our approach to longtermist-focused policy and vice-versa. We think a good amount of our impact as a research organization could come from uncovering these cross-cause insights.