Rethink Priorities

Researching global security, forecasting, and public communication.

Recusal note: Daniel Eth and Ozzie Gooen did not participate in the voting or final discussion around this grant.

Rethink Priorities is an organization that does public-facing research on a variety of EA topics; see their previous work here. Their previous longtermist work has consisted entirely of Luisa Rodriguez’s work on nuclear war. Luisa has since gone on to do other work, including this post, which I’ve referenced multiple times in this very grant round.

Rethink’s longtermist team is very new and is proposing work on fairly disparate topics, so I think about funding them similarly to how I would think about funding several independent researchers. Their longtermist hires are Linchuan Zhang, David Reinstein, and 50% of Michael Aird (he will be spending the rest of his time as a Research Scholar at FHI). I’m not familiar with David Reinstein. Michael Aird has produced a lot of writing over the past year, some of which I’ve found useful. l haven’t looked at any written work Linchuan Zhang has produced (and I’m not aware of anything major), but he has a good track record in forecasting, I’ve appreciated some of his EA forum comments, and my impression is that several longtermist researchers I know think he’s smart. Evaluating them as independent researchers, I think they’re both new and promising enough that I’m interested in paying for a year of their time to see what they produce.

They are proposing to do research in three different areas:

• Global security (conflict, arms control, avoiding totalitarianism)
• Forecasting (estimating existential risk, epistemic challenges to longtermism)
• Polling / message testing (identifying longtermist policies, figuring out how to talk about longtermism to the public)

Broadly, I am most excited about the third of these, because I think there’s a clear and pressing need for it. I think work in the other two areas could be good, but feels highly dependent on the details (their application only described these broad directions).

Here’s some example work in these areas that I could imagine being interested in. Note that I haven’t spent time looking into these ideas; it’s possible that on further reflection I would no longer endorse them, or discover that the work has already been done:

• Finding high-leverage ways to reduce geopolitical conflict that don’t require political influence (or learning that there aren’t any)
• Estimating the expected badness of a totalitarian future compared to an extinction outcome
• Experimenting with daily-rolling forecasts for early warning

We decided to pay 25% of the budget that Rethink requested, which I guessed was our fair share given Rethink’s other funding opportunities.

Supporting research on nuclear weapons and AI arms control.

This is a restricted grant to Rethink Priorities to support their research on nuclear weapons and AI arms control. You can see Rethink Priorities’ past work and most recent self-review here.

The main case for funding them (as I see it) is:

I think their approach of working on tractable research questions and frequently, publicly writing up their results is a promising model which I’d like to see more of in EA.

External references I trust have been positive on the quality of their past work.

Due to the public nature of their output, I think it will be pretty clear whether they're doing good research. (This allows them to learn faster what research is useful and also allows the EA community to learn faster whether we should stop investing in the project.)

Their longtermist work seems to be less well-funded than that of most other organizations in the space, and it’s unlikely they would be able to grow that work without this grant from us.