Rethink Priorities is a think tank dedicated to informing decisions made by high-impact organizations and funders. We work across various cause areas such as longtermism (including forecasting, AI governance, and nuclear risks), building effective altruism, animal welfare (for both farmed and wild animals), and global health and development.
Rethink Priorities
Karma: 5,405
Five Wild Animal Welfare Organizations estimate $3-8M in room for additional funding in 2027
Rethink Priorities Webinar: Measuring Counterfactual Impact in Effective Giving
Cross-Cause Fund: our first distribution round
Help needed: surveying non-EAs
The Expansion of Factory Farming in Africa
[Linkpost] How I would explain to others why I give to global health causes
RP is looking for project founders in neglected animal areas
How AI is Affecting Farmed Aquatic Animals. Part 2: Deployment
Rethink Priorities is hiring.
Announcing the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund
Can AI be Conscious? Biological Naturalism as a Research Program
A Database of Near-Term Interventions for Wild Animals
Rethink Priorities—Updates
Digital Minds Fellowship
Rethink Priorities is partnering with the University of Cambridge and PRISM to organize a seven-day, all-expenses-paid fellowship program on digital minds, August 3–9, 2026. Learn more and apply here by March 27.
Animal Welfare Talent Program
We are piloting the Animal Welfare Talent Program, created for promising researchers who want to work on farmed invertebrates and wild animals. Just this week, we welcomed the first of two fellows who will work with us for the next 4–6 months. While we are not currently seeking applications for this program, you can sign up for our newsletter to get notified if and when we do.
Monthly research roundup
Cause Prioritization
Global Health and Development
Animal Welfare
Electrical stunning does not yet ensure prolonged insensibility in several European finfish species
We’ve launched the Digital Consciousness Model (DCM)
The DCM produces probability estimates for consciousness across four systems: 2024 AI systems, the 1960s AI chatbot ELIZA, humans, and chickens. We assessed these systems by scoring 200 specific indicators drawn from 13 diverse perspectives on consciousness.
Learn about the model and the results:
Read the non-technical summary
Download the full paper
Watch the presentation we gave at the launch event with NYU’s Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy
New research
Cause Prioritization: We wrote summaries of cause prioritization surveys in the US adult population and in the EA community.
Global Health and Development: We’ve publicly released three reports, on AI for health, the impacts of maternal mortality, and the landscape of water programs in LMICs, respectively.
Animal Welfare: We published two new blog posts, the first summarizing message-testing research on de-emphasizing diet change in donation appeals, and the second investigating dual-use alternative protein R&D.
Rethink Priorities Updates:
Hiring:
Director, Global Health and Development Team (remote, apply by September 10) - setting the strategy for RP’s GHD department, overseeing its research, and leading fundraising execution and partner relationships. $154,000/year.
AI Integration Lead (remote, apply by August 30) - leading RP’s effort to determine empirically where AI can reliably augment our research and operational work, and building the tools and workflows that prove out. Open to candidates leaning either way: a researcher fluent in AI tooling, or a technically strong builder with EA literacy. $132,986–$146,447/year.
View both roles and applyUpcoming Webinar: Measuring Counterfactual Impact in Effective Giving
The donations an organization generates and the impact it causes aren’t always the same thing.
Dr. Melanie Basnak, Senior Program Officer at Coefficient Giving, and Dr. Samara Mendez, Senior Economist at Rethink Priorities, will break down that gap at our next RP Strategic Webinar: “Measuring Counterfactual Impact in Effective Giving,” on Thursday, August 27 (10 AM ET / 3 PM BST / 4 PM CEST).
You’ll learn:
Register hereWhat “counterfactual share” means and why it’s the right thing to measure
What the cross-organization data revealed
Practical recommendations, including what to ask donors and how to weight results
New report: Wild Animal Welfare Donation Opportunities & Room for More Funding
We coordinated a collective room-for-more-funding estimate across five organizations with dedicated WAW workstreams: Animal Ethics, the Center for Wild Animal Welfare, the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program, Wild Animal Initiative, and our own Animal Welfare Department.
Each organization estimated what it could do with additional funding in 2027, both to bolster current strategies and to pursue more ambitious ones. The combined estimate: $3.16M–$8.23M in additional funding for 2027.
Read full report