EA - Rethink Priorities 2022 Mid-Year Update: Progress, Plans, Funding by Rachel Norman

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rethink Priorities 2022 Mid-Year Update: Progress, Plans, Funding, published by Rachel Norman on July 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Key points As of 2022, Rethink Priorities (RP) is doing more consultancy-like research, much of which is not–or not yet–published, especially in the areas of global health and development (including climate change) as well as AI governance. To date, RP has conducted over 50 person-years of work. You can find all our published research here. We have spent 38% of our time this year so far working on animal welfare research, 27% on longtermism, 12.5% on surveys, and 16% on global health and development. Our plan is to launch a new Worldview Investigations team. We are setting up a Special Projects department to help launch promising initiatives. We are currently fiscally sponsoring and operationally supporting projects like Epoch, the Insect Welfare Project, Unjournal, EA Market Testing, Condor Camp, and EA Pathfinder. By the end of August, we will have onboarded 25 new staff in research and operations and will have worked with an additional seven research fellows. We also work with 28 contractors for various projects. Our staff count is planned to reach almost 50 full-time equivalents by the end of the year. Subscribe to our newsletter if you want to hear about job openings, events, and research. RP receives funding from Open Philanthropy, EA Funds, FTX Future Fund, Survival and Flourishing Fund, Animal Charity Evaluators, as well as from individual donors–small and large. We are looking for more donations, especially unrestricted ones, to meet our impact aspirations. You can donate here. Our mission Rethink Priorities’ mission is to generate the most impact we can for others in the present and the long-term future. Using evidence and reason, we identify where resources would be most effective and help direct them there. We do this by conducting critical research to inform policymakers and philanthropists, and by guiding the development of new organizations to address key problems. Our work covers important and neglected cause areas, including animal welfare, artificial intelligence, climate change, global health and development, and other work to safeguard a flourishing long-term future. We also aim to understand and support effective altruism–the community of people focused on these issues. We described how we see our path to impact in our strategy post at the end of last year. The next impact assessment is due in late 2022. In the upcoming months, we strive to keep high quality standards for our work and aim at increasing the number of research reports that can be published in academic journals. We believe that our strong operations and ability to hire remotely and internationally help our efforts to scale by finding and integrating the best researchers. At the same time, we hope that providing opportunities to early-career researchers will grow effective altruism by getting more talented people skilled at working on important problems. Having capable managers and leaders will continue to be integral to the organization’s success as we grow. Staff growth In our last hiring round, we received 2,172 applications from 1,636 people for 17 different roles, approximately one third of whom we estimate are committed EAs. Since late 2021, we have hired 16 permanent staff members and seven fellows, and will have nine more permanent hires joining by the end of August. Another four people have accepted offers to start permanent positions by the end of October. We are currently working with 28 contractors, including 12 for the Moral Weight Project and eight for various Special Projects. Six of RP’s new managers are internal promotions, another five are external hires. Kieran Greig joined RP as Chief Strategy Analyst this month. We also s...