In its feature on effective altruism, The Economist highlights Rethink Priorities' research on how animal pain compares to human pain, alongside the roughly 230 billion shrimp farmed at any given time. The Economist worries that EA follows reason to uncomfortable places. Fair enough. Uncomfortable questions deserve care, humility, and honest uncertainty, and that's how we try to approach them. They don't deserve to be dismissed because they’re difficult or unfamiliar. We'll keep asking them. Subscribe to our RP Research Digest and get our research on hard questions, in condensed, high-impact summaries delivered straight to your inbox 👉 https://lnkd.in/dX6nqkCe
Rethink Priorities
Research Services
Rethink Priorities is a think-and-do tank. Through research and action, we improve the lives of humans and animals.
About us
Rethink Priorities is a research organization that conducts critical 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 research covers nonhuman animal welfare, global health and economic development, AI governance and the regulation of other important technologies, and other work to safeguard a flourishing future and build the community of people working on understanding these topics. We follow the principles of effective altruism and are dedicated to using our resources to have the greatest impact on the lives of people and animals.
- Website
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https://www.rethinkpriorities.org/
External link for Rethink Priorities
- Industry
- Research Services
- Company size
- 51-200 employees
- Type
- Nonprofit
- Founded
- 2018
Employees at Rethink Priorities
Updates
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Deciding where to give this year? At RP, our ambition is to build the most rigorous model for allocating charitable dollars across causes, and we invite you to share your thoughts on what would make it most useful. In the latest post in our Cross-Cause Fund series, Elisa Autric🔹 walks through the model behind the fund: what's been built so far, the limitations still to tackle, plans to improve it over the next year, and the people behind the work. Read the full piece 👉 https://lnkd.in/gCDBuwBN And subscribe to our Research Digest to follow the rest of the series!
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Introducing another opportunity to create more impact for animals in this exciting period! We're looking for a Senior Research Manager to lead our new Animal Welfare Strategy Team. The team will support funders and organizations toward their core animal welfare goals, with a focus on terrestrial vertebrates. This will involve a mix of strategy setting, stakeholder management, and in-house research. You'll work with the director Samuel Hilton🔸 to set team's OKRs, and work on hiring, managing incoming consulting projects, designing research processes, and managing staff. 📍 Remote ⏰ Deadline: October 19, 2026 👉 Apply here: https://lnkd.in/eEuZx7XQ If you know someone who would be a great fit, please tag them or share this post!
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Wild animal suffering is an important and neglected problem - but is it solvable? Bob Fischer on our Wild Animal Welfare Intervention Database, and what the initial assessments found 👉 watch his full talk from EAG London 2026: https://lnkd.in/eJhaNDTR
When developing interventions for wild animal welfare, are you ultimately going to cause far more harm than you prevent? Wild animal suffering is an important and neglected problem, but is it solvable? At EAG London 2026, Bob Fischer talked about Rethink Priorities' Wild Animal Welfare Intervention Database (WAWID), a tool for exploring this question. They began with a short list of interventions that have frequently been discussed in the effective animal advocacy movement (e.g., fertility control for rodents, bird-safe glass, more humane pesticides) and a short list of criteria by which to evaluate them (e.g., number of animals directly benefited, backfire risk for non-target animals, promise for coalition building). They capped investigation time at roughly 20 hours per assigned topic, and instructed researchers to focus on scale, levers, robustness, and non-movement resources. A few things from the initial assessments: → There’s something for everyone, but nothing robust to all worldviews. → High value of information for further research. → Further research will be costly and will take time. Link to the full 25-minute video and the database in comments 👇
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Arvo Muñoz Morán presented our Digital Consciousness Model at EAG London this year - a multi-level Bayesian framework built on leading theories of consciousness that turns expert judgments about AI consciousness into quantitative estimates, and a test of whether LLMs could stand in for the human experts. Watch the talk 👉 https://lnkd.in/eNnqXFvs
Why should we bother trying to figure out if AI is conscious? "If we give AIs a stake in our society, we give them resources, relationships with them, protect them, and give them rights, for example, but it turns out that they're not conscious…this could be the great delusion of our time, as it has been dubbed. On the other hand, they might just be conscious, and if we don't protect them in the right ways, that could become a moral catastrophe at an unprecedented scale." At EAG London 2026, Arvo Muñoz Morán (Rethink Priorities) explored whether AI systems can judge their own consciousness. He presented the Digital Consciousness Model — a multi-level Bayesian framework built on leading theories of consciousness that translates expert judgments into quantitative estimates. Because gathering those judgments from human experts is slow and hard to scale, his team tested whether leading LLMs could serve as judges instead. Watch the full talk by clicking the link in the comments 👇
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Our Special Projects program is entering its most significant growth phase yet - more projects, more countries, more complexity. We're looking for a Special Projects Director to help us build what comes next. The program gives new high-impact projects the legal, financial, HR and compliance support to start on day one, instead of spending 6–18 months standing up a legal entity. Epoch AI, Apollo Research and Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (IAPS) all grew under Special Projects before spinning off as independent organizations. As our Special Projects Director, you'll own the program, lead its growing team, and define how it scales from here. 📍 Remote, UTC-5 to UTC+2 preferred ⏰ Deadline: October 12, 2026 ➡️ Apply here: https://lnkd.in/eXgsYeSC If you know someone who would be a great fit, please tag them and share this post!
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Farmed invertebrates and wild animals are counted in the hundreds of billions and upwards, almost entirely outside the scope of existing animal welfare protections, and receive a tiny fraction of the attention directed at farmed vertebrates. Our Neglected Animals Program works on exactly those populations. Its bottleneck is finding out which questions matter, getting them investigated by the most appropriate talent, and ensuring the analysis is acted upon. As our (Senior) Program Officer, you will take a substantial share of that work and run with it: running intervention reviews, commissioning and overseeing external work, and convening the organizations working on a shared problem. The focus is terrestrial invertebrate welfare, split roughly half farmed and half wild. 📍 Remote ⏰ Deadline: October 11, 2026 ➡️ Apply here: https://lnkd.in/endeEhTQ Know someone who would be a great fit? Please tag them or share this post!
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Amid all the discussion of the coming wave of AI-driven philanthropy, one question gets little attention: how should this money be allocated across causes, and on what basis? In our latest Substack post, Marcus Davis argues that the allocation question is too often answered by default - a trusted advisor's instincts, a cause the donor feels connected to, or the assumption that everything worth funding will get funded anyway. He covers why cause areas won't be saturated, why the decisions that most change where money goes are moral as well as empirical, and what it takes to give in a principled way. Read the full piece here 👉 https://lnkd.in/es3CgwB8 In the coming weeks we'll cover giving now vs. later, giving in the face of new AI trajectories, cause prioritization done wrong, and how to avoid giving disasters. Subscribe to the RP Research Digest to stay in the loop!
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How is AI affecting farmed aquatic animals? Our new Substack post summarizes findings from Rethink Priorities' three-part research series on AI in aquaculture, presented at our latest Strategic Animal Webinar by Senior Researcher Sophie Williamson 🔸. It covers who is building AI tools for aquaculture and where they're being deployed, how widely they're already used, and why the same tools that could benefit individual animals could also increase the number of animals being farmed. Learn more 👉 https://lnkd.in/eR_XjSES
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⏰ There's still time to register! Join us tomorrow for our RP Strategic Webinar, in partnership with Coefficient Giving, on measuring counterfactual impact in effective giving: how much of what organizations report is genuinely additional, and how to measure it in a way that's comparable across organizations. With guest speakers Dr. Melanie Basnak (Coefficient Giving) and Dr. Samara Mendez (Rethink Priorities). RSVP 👉 https://luma.com/ugb4v0q1