Since the last Accomplishments Open Thread worked out well, we've decided to try out making it a monthly posting, and see how it works out.
This thread is meant for all of you as a completely safe space, with no social norms of "don't be a braggart" applying - just share and be safe in your sharing. So please share any EA-themed accomplishments you have not yet shared on previous Accomplishment open threads, whether recent or not! Share as many or as few good deeds as you wish.
Please both share about your own good deeds and respond to what other people share with your authentic responses, ranging from upvoting to comments :-) Doing so will help motivate each other to greater accomplishments going forward and build capacity for the EA movement.
Now, sharing about our accomplishments may seek awkward at first, since it goes against social norms, but we in Effective Altruism know the benefit of trying out unorthodox approaches for good reasons. If we publicize our good deeds, we can gain many benefits, for ourselves and for the world.
1) Support each other doing good deeds through providing warm fuzzies/emotional support/encouragement;
2) See if we can help each other out;
3) Inspire others with the opportunity to emulate some aspects of those good deeds for ourselves;
4) Provide an opportunity to amplify the signal about things you want others to know about.
So please share about what you did!
P.S. This is an experiment, and is very open to optimization - besides sharing about your good deeds, please suggest ways to improve any aspects of it. Please take a look at the .impact discussion prior to doing so in case some points were raised and addressed there already :-)
Guess I'll start.
Since last month, I published two EA-themed blogs for The Life You Can Save. "The Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives" describes how my wife and I started a new family tradition of giving each other donations to charities for Valentine's Day. "How a Calculator Helped Me Multiply My Giving" talks about the Impact Calculator, a tool created by The Life You Can Save to calculate the actual impact of your donations to effective charities.
I plan to post these blogs to Intentional Insights and also submit them to The Huffington Post. More excitingly, a version of "The Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives" was accepted for publication to the 16th largest newspaper in the US, with a paper readership of over 400,000 for its Sunday edition, the only one that has op-eds, and over 5,000,000 monthly website visitors.
As President of Intentional Insights, I've also been in talks with the American Humanist Association to consider spreading Giving Games to their members, as part of a broader project with The Life You Can Save to spread EA-themed effective giving to reason-oriented communities. The AHA is pretty interested in this project, and will likely host a Giving Game for their staff, which is a great sign that they will spread it to their groups.
On a personal note, I'm also looking forward to Valentine's Day myself, and giving donations to effective charities on my wife's behalf, per our Valentine's Day tradition. Not saying here which charity I've picked, since she may read this post, and it's supposed to be a surprise :-)