February Open Thread

Reddit made a decision to give away 10% of it's advertising revenue towards charity. The 10 charities with the most votes get the money. You can vote for multiple charities. If you have a reddit account go and vote:

GiveWell: https://www.reddit.com/donate?organization=208625442 (using it's official name "Clear Fund")
Against Malaria Foundation: https://www.reddit.com/donate?organization=203069841
GiveDirectly: https://www.reddit.com/donate?organization=%20271661997
MIRI: http://www.reddit.com/donate?organization=582565917
CFAR: https://www.reddit.com/donate?organization=453100226

Hi all, This is my first post here, but I'm reading the posts here for a while and it's very interesting and inspiring. So thank you, and kudos for all the writers and bloggers. I think this forum is a great outreach platform.

Second, I think many of you will be interesting to participate in the edX MOOC "The Challenges of Global Poverty" here: https://courses.edx.org/courses/MITx/14.73x_1/1T2015/ It is based on the "Poor Economics" (by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, free pdf for course participants) book that was recommended here on the reading list as an evidence base approach to alleviate poverty. Also, discussing EA - course related subjects in the course forum may be good way to outreach for people already invested in the subject.

What do people think about the more polemical people in the rationality and effective altruism space? Some names that come to mind are Robin Hanson, Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky. Each of them seems to derive their persuasive force by identifying examples of what they perceive to be a social ill. In Robin's case, it's often about signalling - when people say or display things that are insincere or hypocritical, in order to achieve some gain. For Scott, it tends to be about the excesses of tribalism. For Eliezer, it's about cognitive biases. It's interesting that these persuasive writers all identify a fundamental and pervasive flaws in human character, and of the importance of overcoming them. It's a kind of motivational critique has obviously been around at least since the bible. It's not necessarily a bad trick, but it does seem to add persuasive value.

Are there other good persuasive techniques in this space?

Helping first-world folks

Edit: I already doubted anyone here wanted to discuss non-cosmopolitan thoughts, so I just gave a link. The downvote suggests that only cosmopolitan ideas are tolerated here.

Would it be worthwhile for aspiring effective altruists to download BOINC or World Community Grid to run on their computers? These are distributed computing programs that try to tackle problems that take a lot of computing power to solve. The software runs in the background on your computer and works on part of a project of your choice.

If so, would it be possible to estimate the best project to participate in? Here are the lists of projects available for BOINC and World Community Grid. At first glance, the project Malariacontrol.net looks most closely related to any promising cause that has been identified in the EA community, as one of their objectives is to "optimize deployment of established interventions and integrated strategies" for malaria (full description).

Might it be worth someone writing a lesson plan about some aspect of EA and making it available to teachers on places they get these plans? Aspects could be effective charity, or global poverty with a mild EA angle. Do any teachers or people familiar with the education system have thoughts on the prospects of this?

Here's the .impact idea page: http://bit.ly/1zeogO4

Here's the Facebook thread: https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/824115974311428/

And here's a helpful comment:

"I teach at the high school level, and I think that you might get more play with interested parties if you targeted the kinds of teachers who would be most likely to use your information, and a lot of them don't use online lesson plan resources because they are generally poorly done. I would look at working with the International Baccalaureate Programs first because they focus on creating citizens of the world. They also have a course in the Diploma Programme called TOK (Theory of Knowledge) which could be a good fit. Also, speaking at conferences with teachers is a great way to introduce a topic, and engage the most engaged educators. Teachers largely don't know what EA is, so they won't know to look for a fantastic lesson plan until they know the topic exists and relates to their work."

To reiterate an offer that I made last week: if you want to hear contributions and suggestions for your career planning, you can crowdsource these here. If you prefer privacy, you may like to use a different username from your usual one.

Pablo Stafforini has been considering doing online EA outreach in non-English languages and is seeking thoughts on this.

Here's what he said on Facebook:

"For the last couple of months, I have been considering seriously the possibility of switching my energies to doing outreach in the Spanish-speaking world. Currently there is no organized Spanish-speaking EA community, and until I created them a couple of weeks ago, there were no Facebook EA groups or pages, no Wikipedia article about EA, and no EA websites of any kind. Yet Spanish is the second most widely spoken language measured by number of native speakers, and the third most widely spoken language measured by number of fluent speakers. Spanish-speaking EA meme-spreading thus seems to be both a very uncrowded and a very important cause.

"However, this analysis may be too simplistic. In particular, I worry that English may have acquired such a dominant position in elite circles globally as to offset any advantages that non-English languages may appear to have when assessed strictly in terms of quantity of speakers. One may argue, for instance, that the group of people whose native language isn’t English will likely speak English as a second language if they are at all receptive to the EA meme. There are also considerations related to the link between the geographical region in which a language is spoken and the level of development of countries in that region: people in developing countries will (sadly) on average have lower incomes, lower levels of educational attainment, and in general a lower score on most metrics that correlate with power to change the world for the better.

"What do others here think? Any feedback is greatly appreciated."

Here's the FB thread: https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/permalink/823288501060842/