Hello everyone,
It's been a big launch month for the Effective Altruism Forum. To the roughly 100 existing posts on the Effective Altruism Blog, we've added 43 new posts.
Congrats Jess, Kaj, Peter, Katja and Topher for writing the five most popular posts! Thanks everyone for your comments, without which the forum would not be such a fun place to hang out!
Now is the time to throw the forum open to lots more new contributions. To facilitate this, we've decreased the karma requirement for writing a new article. You can now post as soon as you get ten karma (posting used to require 30). As usual, you can upvote, downvote, comment, write in the Open Thread and post meetups right away. I'll continue to supplement your articles with some classic introductory essays.
In terms of updates in the last week, we've installed the ability to moderate user's contributions. Note that contributors on this site have so far been sufficiently well-behaved so far that I haven't had to delete a single comment, which is a credit to effective altruists, and may this continue far into the future! We have also updated the Recent on EA Blogs section to include just the rationality-related posts, rather than all posts from Slate Star Codex, which means that our sidebar will be less densely filled with Scott's articulate and provocative commentaries but will hopefully give people a more representative impression of effective altruism. (Including this subset of Scott's posts was always our original intent anyway.)
If you haven't already introduced yourself, then now is a great time to do so. Use the comment thread below to tell others something that others might find interesting about you!
Enjoy!
I didn't make an introduction comment in the last post, so I suppose I should do one here. I'm David Barry -- one of the migrated posts from the old blog is authored by the user David_Barry, but I signed up my usual Internet handle before thinking about the account that had already been made for me. I live in Perth, where I moved for work earlier this year, having previously lived in Brisbane.
I always used to think I'd become a physicist one day, but what was supposed to be a PhD went badly for too long and I escaped with a Master's. I've now been working in mining geostatistics for almost six years, and donating a chunk of my salary to GiveWell-recommended charities for five years.
I don't do much actively in EA apart from the donations I send out roughly once a month. Occasionally I'll knuckle down and work through cost-effectiveness calcu-guestimates, but mostly I just like skimming the EA Facebook group and this forum, occasionally chipping in.