Rethink Priorities is a research organization that conducts research to inform policymakers and major foundations about how to best help people and nonhuman animals in both the present and the long-term future. Our work informs key stakeholders of the effective altruism community regarding decisions around funding, interventions, and research time allocation worth millions of dollars every year. This year we hired 14 new people. We now have a staff of 28 people, corresponding to 24.75 full-time equivalents (with 19.75 FTE focused on research and 5 FTE on operations). We’ll have spent about $2.1M USD in 2021.

This year we expanded our operations team and hired multiple researchers across multiple causes, allowing us to expand and improve our animal welfare and EA movement building work, and build a dedicated longtermism team. Over the next few years we plan to expand our work in animal welfare, relaunch our work in longtermism, and continue our work in movement building.

Rethink Priorities is an EA research organization focused on influencing funders and key decision-makers to improve decisions within EA and EA-aligned organizations. Over the past year, we have produced a large amount of research on a number of topics in animal welfare, risks from nuclear war, and EA movement growth. This work includes cost-effectiveness estimates of corporate campaigns, farmed fish welfare, fish stocking, the impact of cat predation, invertebrate sentience, the likelihood and severity of nuclear winter, and a comprehensive evaluation of the 2018 EA Survey.

Two of our founding values at Rethink Priorities are transparency and impact assessment. Here we present the results of our stated intention to annually run a formal survey to discover if one of our target audiences, decision-makers and donors in the areas which we investigate, has read our work and if it has influenced their decision-making. Due to the small sample of 47 respondents, the disproportionate importance of some of these respondents, and the ability to highlight comments from only those who opted to share their responses publicly, the precise results should not be taken too seriously. It is also very important to note that this is just one of the many ways we are assessing our impact. Nevertheless, we will present the overall results and the results by cause area.

Animal Charity Evaluators has released an extensive report on farmed fish welfare focusing on current conditions of farmed fish and possible interventions. We contributed to this report, particularly to the slaughter methods and environmental enrichment sections.

Rethink Priorities is an independent project of Rethink Charity, founded in January 2018 by Peter Hurford and Marcus A. Davis to figure out how to better allocate our time and money toward doing more good. We recently expanded to a team of ten and have an exciting research agenda for 2019. Our 2019 budget is $447K (see table below for details) and we are looking to raise $294K more.