In this report, Associate Researcher Oliver Guest investigates the idea of bringing about international agreements to coordinate on safe AI development (“international safety agreements”), evaluates the tractability of these interventions, and suggests the best means of carrying them out.

This post outlines a framework of five characteristics that seem most relevant for longtermists to consider when evaluating the impact of a “global agent” (as defined below) like a world government or a strong global governance institution.

This post discusses what the cause area of “Improving institutional decision-making” (IIDM) currently encompasses, and presents some frameworks for thinking about IIDM’s pathways to impact and what (I think) IIDM should entail.

This post attempts to (1) tease apart different features of liberal democracy and (2) analyse how increasing or decreasing a society’s level of each feature would affect various potential intermediate goals for longtermists. By potential intermediate goals, we mean goals we could pursue to potentially increase the expected value of the far future, via four broad categories: existential risk reduction, trajectory changes, speeding up development, or “meta-longtermism.”

The European Commission is planning to revise and expand the scope of European Union animal protection policies with new legislative proposals in late 2023, likely followed by another ~12-24 months of negotiations before being passed into law. The effective animal advocacy movement should attempt to have the most impact during the policy formation stage and to prioritise which countries need to be targeted to ensure proposals are not significantly weakened before passing into law. I’ve recently written two reports to contribute to strategic discussions, here and here. The two reports total more than 57,000 words. Below is an overview of the project, the main recommendations, and a summary of the main arguments.

The European Union may be an arena where there are promising opportunities to improve farmed animal welfare through legislation due to historic legal precedents, high public concern for farmed animals, a professional animal protection movement, and new momentum for legislation. Pushing for higher minimum farmed animal welfare standards in law has brought many victories in Europe, but laws are only as good as their implementation. As the animal welfare movement continues to push for higher legal standards for a wider range of farmed animals, one should also pay attention to whether these standards are being practiced in reality. In this report by Rethink Priorities, we focus on the European Union as an example of legislative protection of farmed animal welfare and detail the mechanisms by which compliance is sought.

As part of Rethink Priorities' research into European Union farmed animal welfare policy, here we sketch out some points we think are important to consider when assessing whether EU law is an important arena to work on for improving the lives of farmed animals. This is an entry in a series by Rethink Priorities that will examine how EU animal welfare laws are made and enforced, the type of laws that are most successful, and the impact of EU standards abroad via trade policies. This work may help inform the funding strategies of those concerned with EU level animal welfare legislation, the lobbying and advocacy activity of groups directly involved in the EU, and policy makers interested in designing EU laws most likely to be complied with.

Ballot initiatives are a form of direct democracy in which citizens can gather signatures to qualify a proposed piece of legislation for the ballot, which is then subject to a binding up-or-down vote by the general electorate. Ballot initiatives are possible in Switzerland, Taiwan, many U.S. states and cities, and elsewhere. Ballot initiatives appear to maintain several advantages over more traditional policy lobbying, including lower barriers to entry and more direct control over the final legislation. However, the ultimate cost-effectiveness of a ballot initiative campaign depends on several factors, many of which are difficult to specify precisely. Although ballot initiatives hold enough promise to warrant additional investigation, it is not yet possible to say to what extent ballot initiative campaigns ought to be pursued by the effective altruism community.

In this essay, we discuss the opportunities that deliberative reforms offer for improving institutional decision-making. We begin by describing deliberation and its links to democratic theory, and then sketch out examples of deliberative designs. Following this, we explore the evidence that deliberation can engender fact-based reasoning, opinion change, and under certain conditions can motivate longterm thinking. So far, most deliberative initiatives have not been invested with a direct role in the decision-making process and so the majority of policy effects we see are indirect. Providing deliberative bodies with a binding and direct role in decision-making could improve this state of affairs. We end by highlighting some limitations and areas of uncertainty before noting who is already working in this area and avenues for further research.