EA - Worldview Investigations Team: An Overview by Rethink Priorities

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: Worldview Investigations Team: An Overview, published by Rethink Priorities on February 25, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.IntroductionRethink Priorities’ Worldview Investigations Team (WIT) exists to improve resource allocation within the effective altruism movement, focusing on tractable, high-impact questions that bear on philanthropic priorities. WIT builds on Rethink Priorities’ strengths as a multi-cause, stakeholder-driven, interdisciplinary research organization: it takes action-relevant philosophical, methodological, and strategic problems and turns them into manageable, modelable problems. Rethink Priorities is currently hiring multiple roles to build out the team:Worldview Investigations Philosophy ResearcherWorldview Investigations Quantitative ResearcherWorldview Investigations ProgrammerThese positions offer a significant opportunity for thoughtful and curious individuals to shift the priorities, research areas, and philanthropic spending strategies of major organizations through interdisciplinary work. WIT tackles problems like:How should we convert between the units employed in various cost-effectiveness analyses (welfare to DALYs-averted; DALYs-averted to basis points of existential risk averted, etc.)?What are the implications of moral uncertainty for work on different cause areas?What difference would various levels of risk- and ambiguity-aversion have on cause prioritization? Can those levels of risk- and/or ambiguity-aversion be justified?The work involves getting up to speed with the literature in different fields, contacting experts, writing up reasoning in a manner that makes sense to experts and non-experts alike, and engaging with quantitative models.The rest of this post sketches WIT’s history, strategy, and theory of change.WIT’s HistoryWorldview investigation has been part of Rethink Priorities from the beginning, as some of Rethink Priorities’ earliest work was on invertebrate sentience. Invertebrate animals are far more numerous than vertebrate animals, but the vast majority of animal-focused philanthropic resources go to vertebrates rather than invertebrates. If invertebrates aren’t sentient, then this is as it should be, given that sentience is necessary for moral status. However, if invertebrates are sentient, then it would be very surprising if the current resource allocation were optimal. So, this project involved sorting through the conceptual issues associated with assessing sentience, identifying observable proxies for sentience, and scouring the academic literature for evidence with respect to each proxy. In essence, this project developed a simple, transparent tool for making progress on fundamental questions about the distribution of consciousness.If the members of a species have a sufficient number of relevant traits, then they probably deserve more philanthropic attention than they’ve received previously.Rethink Priorities’ work on invertebrate sentience led directly to its next worldview investigation project, as even if animals are equally sentient, they may not have equal capacity for welfare. For all we know, some animals may be able to realize much more welfare than others. Jason Schukraft took up this question in his five-post series about moral weight, again trying to sort out the conceptual issues and make empirical progress by finding relevant proxies for morally relevant differences. His influential work laid the foundation for the Moral Weight Project, which, again, created a simple, transparent tool for assessing differences in capacity for welfare. Moreover, it developed a way to implement those differences in cost-effectiveness analyses.In addition to its work on animals, Rethink Priorities has done research on standard metrics for evaluating health interventions and estimating the burden...