Thanks so much, Michael. This is really kind, and it’s great to hear our work has prompted further thinking on how MMT works in practice. Operationalizing a model meant making many judgment calls, so we’re glad to get feedback from someone who knows the theory so well. We’d love to read the essay when it’s ready.

We agree this is a substantive choice and that the model’s outputs may be sensitive to it. We designed our current set of worldviews as a tractable approximation. It aims to capture the distinctions most decision-relevant for allocating across causes, rather than map the full space of possible moral theories. We don’t think it’s the uniquely correct carving, and we’ve discussed alternative ways of individuating worldviews internally and want to explore them further, including how much allocations shift under different carvings. Your suggestion of building from the decision-relevant debates is close in spirit to how we think about this, so we’d be very keen to compare notes.

The absence of a particular fund from the CCF shouldn’t be read as a 0% credence in this particular fund (let alone in a theory of welfare or in a cause) being worth supporting. Credences in the model attach to worldviews. Which funds and opportunities appear partly depends on what we’ve been able to evaluate so far, so this may at the moment be a coverage gap rather than a credence judgment. Expanding that coverage is an active area of work for us, and we’re currently looking into how mental health should be represented, including whether that means adding new funding options. We hope to share more on this later in the year.

Our model's current estimates fall within the range of those you discuss here (mean of 10, with a range between 3.6 and 29 hens per dollar), so this was an editing mistake that doesn't affect our model. In the future, we hope to incorporate more estimates of the marginal cost-effectiveness of such work to ensure we're keeping up-to-date.
We will update the post now.

Thanks for the comment, Vasco. You might be glad to hear that we plan to look at soil invertebrates in our updated moral weights work this year. Otherwise, we're still developing our plans for when and how to incorporate indirect effects in the model. We will update here on the EA Forum about our plans and model changes over the coming weeks.

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.
 

Upcoming 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:

• What "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. 

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
    • Which charitable causes do U.S. adults care most about?
    • Which cause areas do Effective Altruism community members prioritize?.
  • Global Health and Development
    • AI for Health: Where can frontier AI make the biggest difference in global health? and What does AI progress mean for health systems in low- and middle-income countries?
    • The impacts of maternal mortality
    • Landscape of water programs in low- and middle-income countries
  • Animal Welfare
    • Electrical stunning does not yet ensure prolonged insensibility in several European finfish species 
    • Can investment into alternative protein innovation have unintended consequences for animals?
    • Contrary to popular belief, adult black soldier flies can eat 

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.

Updated, thank you Johannes!

Thank you!

Rethink Priorities is seeking a Global Health and Development Director who will work closely with all team members and have at least initially direct reports of two Senior Research Managers. The Department typically carries out short research projects, often commissioned by philanthropic organizations and other relevant actors in the global health and development space. 

Salary: $125,000 - $125,250 / year for a full-time position (prorated for part-time work)

Location: Remote (we can hire from many countries; some international travel is required)

Deadline: February 25, 2024, at the end of the day (11:59 PM) in US/Eastern (EST) time zone 

Learn more here on our website!