Seconding this. I've heard both "you could die from toxic shock syndrome if you don't clean your cup properly" and also there are something like 5 known cases and no deaths of TSS from menstrual cups. Getting the right balance of education would be important: conveying that cleaning the cup is needed, but it's apparently unlikely to cause a serious problem with typical use.

Seems like a great reason for donors to give during their own lifetimes instead of setting up a long-term foundation.

Students for High Impact Charity was a project to support groups at high schools, but it had difficulty getting traction. It's hard to start a group from afar if you're not a student or faculty there.

Vox piece about Foege's work.

In the US, Instacart has a "dietary preferences" setting where you can opt to have more shown to you from categories like vegan, vegetarian, organic, etc. But when I tried it, it seemed to show me basically the same as usual.

I think there are real downsides of mixing unrelated goals (in this case: improving livelihoods/skills for educated people in LMICs, and getting work done). 

• remote work requires people who already have computer access, reliable internet, professional skills, and proficient English (or whatever language you need). So these are people who are already relatively well-off in their setting.

• management capacity is often a bottleneck, so rather than onboarding people to things like deadlines and quality standards, for the sake of getting the work done efficiently you might rather pay a higher rate to get someone who doesn't need as much hand-holding. (Maybe this isn't relevant if the work you want done isn't itself aiming at a positive impact, and you're ok with your widget business running less efficiently in order to offer a jobs program.)

  If you have needs that can be met just as well by remote workers in LMICs, seems great! But I wouldn't start with the premise that this is your best option for improving the world.

Mostly to various projects on AI risk policy and communications, and a smaller portion to GiveWell's recommended charities

For people interested in this type of content, Yale has/had a similar course called "Life Worth Living", mostly from a religious rather than philosophy perspective. A variety of interviews with past guests: https://lifeworthliving.yale.edu/practitioners

Top level post:

I haven’t actually seen the evidence that the LessWrong community was particularly early on covid or gave particularly wise advice on what to do about it.

I'm saying microcovid was a useful contribution on what to do about covid that came out of the rationality community.

To give an example of where rationalists produced a useful tool here, I found microcovid useful. For example, to convince my father that it was very low-risk for him to resume outdoor social activities.