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!
Hello, Boris Yakubchik here. 29 year old, residing in New Jersey
Finished Rutgers University (New Jersey, USA) with a BA in Mathematics, MA in Education. Started a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology. Joined Giving What We Can a few months after it started. Quit my Ph.D. program 2 years aiming to devote more time to EA stuff (I wrote about it here). Worked as a math teacher in high school, first year giving 50%. Subsequent years worked only part-time so went back to giving at least 10%. Currently a full-time math tutor, still aiming to follow the Earning to Give (E2G) strategy.
I helped run the Rutgers chapter of GWWC; few days ago we celebrated our 4th anniversary. I made a 5-minute video about members of GWWC. I gave a TEDxRutgers talk last year. I was interviewed by Peter Hurford, read here. I've read extensively and would love to give my recommendations.
Feel free to contact me, I'd love to help out a good project if I have the skills and can find the time :)