I am the Principal Research Director at Rethink Priorities and currently lead our Surveys and Data Analysis department. Most of our projects involve private commissions for core EA movement and longtermist orgs, where we provide:
Private polling to assess public attitudes
Message testing / framing experiments, testing online ads
Expert surveys
Private data analyses and survey / analysis consultation
Impact assessments of orgs/programs
Formerly, I also managed our Wild Animal Welfare department and I’ve previously worked for Charity Science, and been a trustee at Charity Entrepreneurship and EA London.
My academic interests are in moral psychology and methodology at the intersection of psychology and philosophy.
The question of whether “sub-goal” x is the “simplest” or best “proxy” for our more ultimate goals doesn’t seem particularly useful and can be highly misleading, as in the example you chose. You conclude that promoting animal welfare is very probably not the best cause (because promoting empathy probably dominates it as a proxy), whereas we can’t say the same for promoting human welfare. But it could still be the case that promoting animal welfare is a better proxy than human welfare for far future flourishing, even though there’s a yet better intermediary in the case of animal welfare. The problem is that multiple descriptions of causes can be described, and we can generate multiple conflicting but practically uninformative statements about proxies and causes.