Astral Codex Ten

Rethink Priorities

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Rethink Priorities

Article

Rethink Priorities is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 15 times across 15 issues between June 22, 2021 and February 02, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Charles Dillon of Rethink Priorities”; “trusted EA think tank Rethink Priorities”; “The Rethink Priorities analysis is a great mathematical model”. It most often appears alongside GiveWell, Metaculus, Twitter.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 15
  • Issue count: 15
  • First seen: June 22, 2021
  • Last seen: February 02, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

21
June 22, 2021 · Original source
Charles Dillon of Rethink Priorities has a post on the Effective Altruism Forum: Data on forecasting accuracy across different time horizons and levels of forecaster experience.
Inline links: Rethink Priorities, Effective Altruism Forum, Data on forecasting accuracy across different time horizons and levels of forecaster experience
Model City Monday
July 05, 2021 · Original source
Now institutional effective altruism has evaluated those claims, in the form of an analysis by trusted EA think tank Rethink Priorities. They conclude that “it is unlikely that charter cities will be more cost-effective than GiveWell top charities in terms of directly improving wellbeing”.
Inline links: an analysis by trusted EA think tank Rethink Priorities
The Rethink Priorities analysis is a great mathematical model, and a good counterbalance to inflated estimates of charter city donation cost-effectiveness. But like all models, it’s only as good as the assumptions that go into it and the degree to which desirable effects can be easily quantified, and right now both of those are iffy enough that I doubt it’s the final word on the matter.
In his response to Rethink Priorities (mentioned above), Lutter said the World Bank’s study on SEZs wasn’t applicable because charter cities were going to be bigger and better than SEZs’ 0.5 - 10 km^2. But two of the most promising existing charter city projects, Prospera and Ciudad Morazan, are starting on land of 0.25 km^2 (though they could get larger). Lutter is suitably concerned:
Links For July
July 23, 2021 · Original source
25: How Asia Works (reviewed here) argued that agricultural land reform (ie redistributing land from large landholders to peasants) was an important part of the industrializing process that helped East Asia become First World. While reviewing it, I wondered if pushing land distribution might be an effective altruist intervention. Now the organized EA movement (in the form of the increasingly prominent Rethink Priorities group) has published an analysis of it as a cause area. I interpret their conclusion as being that it’s not entirely clear that smaller farms produce more, and although it’s possible that they do, land redistribution is so politically intractable that it probably isn’t worth focusing on this too hard unless an unexpected opportunity comes up.
Inline links: here, an analysis of it as a cause area
21
August 02, 2021 · Original source
_ Mark Lutter expands on his disagreements with Rethink Priorities’ report questioning the cost-effectiveness of charter cities. Also useful as a good rundown for what might be in the pipeline: he says he is especially interested in getting charter city legislation for Nigeria, that one additional Latin American country (exact identity currently secret) may follow Honduras in proposing a ZEDE-type law, and that there may be opportunities in Somaliland as well.
Inline links: expands on his disagreements
ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
1DaySooner and Rethink Priorities, $17,500, to research public attitudes around human challenge trials. Human challenge trials are studies where scientists deliberately try to infect volunteers with a disease to see if a treatment can prevent or cure it. They're much faster than waiting for people to get the disease naturally, and could have significantly shortened the wait for coronavirus vaccines. But they're controversial and nobody was able to get approval to do a challenge trial for COVID until 2021, which is why we had to wait so long for good treatment. Preliminary research suggests lots of people support these trials; I think building common knowledge of this is a first step towards making them available during future pandemics. Rethink Priorities is a respected effective altruist research organization. 1Day Sooner is a group lobbying for challenge trials. They’re currently seeking $10 million to use challenge studies to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine. Email josh@1daysooner.org if you can help
Inline links: 1DaySooner, Rethink Priorities, josh@1daysooner.org
Who Predicted 2022?
January 24, 2023 · Original source
20th: Peter Wildeford. Peter is the co-CEO of effective altruist organization Rethink Priorities. He’s also one of the top forecasters on Metaculus. You can hear him discuss his forecasting strategies on the Inside View podcast.
Inline links: Rethink Priorities, the Inside View podcast
Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
17: A while ago I went back and forth on some informal studies showing that our intuitive estimate of animals’ moral value matches how many cortical neurons they have (eg a chimp has 100x more moral value than a chicken and 100x more cortical neurons). Rethink Priorities investigated in more depth and provides a long discussion of their findings here. My summary: it actually does match up well, but only after averaging out a lot of non-matching data and people who violently reject the premise, significance unclear.
Inline links: I went back and forth, provides a long discussion of their findings here
Impact Market Mini-Grants Results
October 09, 2023 · Original source
I won't claim to have 100% read the paper, but I think it's valuable to get academics engaged with these topics, and the project is part of Rhys-Bernard’s PhD dissertation which he’ll be defending soon. David is a researcher at Rethink Priorities and helping him get his PhD will hopefully improve his ability to contribute to this excellent organization. (Possibly premature) congratulations, David!
23
December 05, 2023 · Original source
Specifically: Paul said 50% of severe problems but only ~15% extinction. The “average AI engineer” number is from a survey with likely response bias. The extinction tournament numbers given in the original are for catastrophe, not extinction. I cannot find a source for the average American number - it doesn’t seem to be in the linked Rethink Priorities report. Let me know if you can find it. 3: New Metaculus tournaments opening, including respiratory illnesses and the Global Pulse Tournament (with $1500 in prizes).
Inline links: respiratory illnesses, Global Pulse Tournament
Does Capitalism Beat Charity?
January 04, 2024 · Original source
RIP …so this doesn’t support the “invest in whatever companies give the best rate of return” narrative either. What’s left is strategy 3: Do something like donating to charity, but the donation should go to charities that promote capitalism somehow, or be an investment in companies doing charitable things (impact investing) I find this promising, but I don’t know what a good charity along these lines would be. There are some charities that send economists (or other professionals) to developing countries and advise them on how to do more capitalism. This kind of development aid has been roundly criticized and did especially badly in Russia. I’ve supported some of these that seem especially careful in the past, and would be willing to support them more if someone found a very good one with a strong track record. (also, I’m concerned that even though rich countries got rich because of capitalism, it’s no longer that easy for poor countries to get rich with the same type of capitalism - existing rich countries will outcompete them - and we’re not entirely sure how to help poor countries get rich now, although probably good institutions are always better than bad institutions) I am partial to Charter Cities Institute, which helps advise developing countries on creating charter cities that have better governance and less corruption than the rest of the region. But EA evaluator group Rethink Priorities has a report on why they don’t think this is quite as valuable as traditional charity (they’re not sure special economic zones consistently make areas develop faster, and they think this finding should be applied to charter cities too). Here’s CCI’s counterargument (they think SEZs aren’t a good reference class for the charter cities they want). I think both sides make good points but I’m currently more convinced by Rethink Priorities’ (although I do still donate to CCI sometimes). Finally, you could invest in developing-world projects and companies that seem unusually likely to make an overall economic difference there. I’m nervous about this because of China’s Belt and Road initiative, which did this at huge scale for infrastructure, but doesn’t seem to have done much good (and might have done some bad). Also, I’m not smart money, which means I’m exposed to adverse selection - if there’s a company that can’t raise enough money to build a dam in Kenya and needs your charity dollar to make the budget work, why hasn’t Wall Street come through for them? One plausible answer is “because it’s a bad company with a bad plan”. Admittedly another plausible answer is “because it has a 5% RoI, the next Instacart has a 6% RoI, and so Wall Street would prefer the next Instacart but you as a charitable individual should prefer the Kenyan dam.” I would potentially be willing to believe this if some smart charity evaluator would tell me which projects were good. But $1 million only gets you a fraction of a dam, and does get tens of thousands of clean water dispensers, so I would also want someone to present the specific case for why the dam would be better (not just the heuristic “capitalism is always better than charity”). I’m willing to believe that some capitalist charities - whether these are development aid think tanks, or investment in developing-world projects - could potentially be better than usual charities. The reason I’m not donating to these is that nobody’s done the hard work of identifying these and calculating their expected value, and I don’t feel qualified to do that work myself. I have a high prior that any nonprofit that hasn’t been rigorously shown to be good is probably bad, and the potential advantage of capitalism over normal charity usually isn’t enough to overcome my decreased certainty in its efficacy2. UPDATE: I respond to your comments and counterarguments here. 1Instacart is worth $10 billion and has 10 million customers, so naively you might say that it cost $1000 in investment per customer. But successful companies are worth more than the amount of investment it took to create them. I don’t know how much has ever been invested in Instacart total, but this also seems like the wrong question. You, today, can’t invest in “the next Instacart” - everyone wants to invest in the next successful company, but nobody can be sure which one it will be. All you can do is invest in a basket of promising-looking startups: most will fail but some will succeed. Because of this, I thought the best way to represent “the amount of investment money it originally took back when Instacart was founded in 2012 to create Instacart today” as the current value of $10 billion discounted by the rate of return a good VC gets on their investments, which I think is about 7.5%. That suggests it took about $5 billion of investment in 2012 to create the amount of value represented by Instacart today, ie 10 million customers getting a good deal on grocery delivery. That means $500 in investment per customer. Because most charities can’t take $5 billion in new funding, I chose to represent this as per million dollars, so 2,000 customers per $1 million. I understand this is a very shaky estimate and I’m hoping that all the comparisons I’m going to make are so order-of-magnitude different that nobody really cares about the specifics. There’s one thing that confuses me here, which is that Instacart has 10 million customers and makes $2.5 billion in revenue per year, suggesting each customer spends $250. But you can get a yearly subscription to Instacart for $100, after which the service is free. So either customers are overwhelmingly being stupid, not buying the subscription, and paying much more than it should cost - or I’m missing something here and the numbers are wrong. Again, I’m hoping all of this is done across so many orders of magnitude that it doesn’t matter. 2Doesn’t this principle also mean I shouldn’t do ACX Grants, where I donate to fledgling projects with no evidence of efficacy? Maybe, and every year I debate whether I should really do this. I think the arguments for a distinction are: ACX Grants go to charities where my donation potentially has a very high upside, so I’m not as concerned about the high prior on failure.
Inline links: roundly criticized, in Russia, no longer that easy, how to help poor countries get rich now, Charter Cities Institute, has a report, CCI’s counterargument, Belt and Road initiative, 2, here, 1, 2
Highlights From The Comments On Capitalism & Charity
January 11, 2024 · Original source
Like Michael, I think the theoretical case for charter cities and SEZs is strong. Rethink Priorities tried to supplement that with an empirical case, but it fell flat because most of them are poorly designed half-efforts that don’t work, and the empirical results reflected that. The natural next step would be to come up with some objective criteria for “well-done charter city / SEZ”, do a report-level amount of work demonstrating that these do work, and then argue that whatever we’re debating (eg CCI) fits the criteria for a well-done CC/SEZ and so its expected return should be in the group we’ve now proven to be good, not the other group Rethink Priorities proved to be bad. This would be a big effort, and AFAIK nobody has done it yet. So I continue to classify good CC/SEZs in the bin of “theoretically strong case, not super-strong empirical evidence yet”.
Propose a specific capitalist development charity for me to donate to (not a vague gesture at a type of charity, but a specific website with a donation page), and show me an analysis for how many dollars per QALY you get from it which finds it’s better than existing EA charities. Preferably this should be peer-reviewed or at least written by a good economist. (The only capitalist development charity I’ve seen try this was Charter Cities Institute, their numbers were absurdly high, I think the Rethink Priorities report reasonably suggested a much lower prior, and now the ball is in CCI’s court to demonstrate that they can pick winners effectively enough that the Rethink Priorities prior is inappropriate. To be clear, I think this would be a bad use of CCI’s time because it would be really hard and nobody but me has asked for it.)
Contra Stone On EA
May 30, 2024 · Original source
According to Rethink Priorities, the organization that keeps track of this kind of thing, there were about 7,400 active effective altruists in 2020 (90% CI: 4,700 - 10,000). Growth rate was 14% per year but has probably gone down lately, so there are probably around 10,000 now. This matches other sources for high engagement with EA ideas (8,898 people have signed the Giving What We Can pledge).
Inline links: According to Rethink Priorities,, have signed
Open Thread 360
December 16, 2024 · Original source
1: If you identify as an effective altruist, Rethink Priorities would like you to take the annual EA survey.
Inline links: the annual EA survey
Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
37: Rethink Priorities’ public polling on EA. Good example of the maxim “You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” Approximately 1% of people have heard of effective altruism, and their opinion is mostly “I think it has something to do with charity, so I guess it sounds nice”. Median opinion on FTX and SBF was “never heard of them” (only 20% of people had!)
Inline links: Rethink Priorities’ public polling on EA
Open Thread 419
February 02, 2026 · Original source
Peter Wildeford, who placed 1st out of all 2975 participants. Peter is a forecasting celebrity, a leader at EA organizations Rethink Priorities and Institute For AI Policy and Strategy, and a blogger at The Power Law. He regularly makes the top 20 or so, but this year he was able to close the distance and take the top spot. I often rely on his blogging for my geopolitical opinions, and these contest results suggest that you should too. Peter is also the first ACX Forecasting Contest winner to have been featured on the Daily Show:
Inline links: forecasting celebrity, Rethink Priorities, Institute For AI Policy and Strategy, The Power Law