This post introduces an app—Distributr—developed by Rethink Priorities’ Jamie Elsey to better incorporate and visualize uncertainty in cost-effectiveness estimates. As a case study, the post discusses GiveWell’s assessment of Happier Lives Institute’s cost-effectiveness analyses for StrongMinds.

This blog post examines why people adapt vegetarian and vegan diets. RP’s 2019 survey indicated that the greatest sources of influence were personal interactions, as well as interactions with animals. The importance attributed to social media, online videos, and documentaries is also high, particularly among more recent adopters.

This post is a linkpost from the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. The report was a collaboration between 1Day Sooner and Rethink Priorities.

On June 2-3, 2023, Rethink Priorities conducted an online poll of US adults to assess their views regarding a recent open statement from the Center for AI Safety (CAIS). The statement read: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

This nationally-representative survey of U.S. public opinions on AI aimed to replicate and extend other recent polls. The findings suggest that people are cautious about AI and favor federal regulation though they perceive other risks (e.g. nuclear war) as more likely to cause human extinction.

This post reports the results of a survey we ran in April 2022 investigating how many people had heard of ‘effective altruism’ in a large sample, weighted to be representative of the US general population. This survey replicates and extends a survey we ran in conjunction with CEA in early 2021, which focused only on US students. Because that survey was not representative, we think that these new results offer a significant advance in estimating how many people in the US population have heard of EA, and in particular sub-groups like students and even students at top-ranked universities.