Awesome, I'd love to chat when you're around in Oxford!
 

I agree r.e the unhealthiness of maximise, at least for me personally. Makes me wonder- what could a partial career pledge look like? Some options:

• 10% of my career thinking/ planning will be about the effectiveness of my choices.
• I'll spend at least 10% of my career making a direct impact (through volunteering or a full time role)
• Or drop the 10% and just get people to commit to one effective career planning day a year. The Better Career Pledge can then release a guide/ hold meetups on that day, and then you get retention/ celebration/ maybe a recruiting tool. 

Cheers, and thanks for all the links!
I read the binding problem section of your post- it's really interesting and something I've thought about before, but without a nice phrase to bind to it. 
From an initial read, I'm pretty sceptical that the binding problem is something we can talk about/ experiment on/ introspect on. I.e it feels kind of impossible for me to answer to what extent my various experiences at this moment are bound together, and what would be different if they weren't bound, but they were integrated into the information I'm acting on in some other way. Is there a reason to think a "binding mechanism" is an easier thing to investigate than "consciousness"? A valid answer to that question is: please read my post in full, lol. 

Hey Lokesh, 

Thanks for coming to the EA Forum with your question!

In some ways, I haven't seen much discussion of this question on the EA Forum, in another I've seen loads. 

The ways people interested in Effective Altruism have found to reliably help underprivileged kids are mostly based around:

• Saving their lives: for example, making sure they don't get malaria, getting them vaccinated, etc.
• Helping them live healthier lives: Lead exposure elimination so that they don't get lead poisoned (which amongst other things seems to lead to lower IQ and all that entails), Vitamin A supplementation to prevent blindness, food fortification, and deworming. 
• All of the above: work on increasing economic growth, and direct donations to underprivileged families, are promising interventions across the board. 

I know this probably doesn't answer your question, because you are thinking of interventions within education. Perhaps there are some real slam dunks there that I haven't heard about (and I'd welcome other commenters to mention them). 

Effective Altruist ideas are perhaps helpful here because they encourage you to take a step back, and think "if I really want to help underprivileged kids the most, what can I do?" it's possible (though by no means am I certain) that the best intervention isn't in education. 

Thanks!

What do you mean by "impact-based giving"? Do you mean giving that considers effectiveness (like any effective giving), or do you mean high upside, low likelihood of success giving?

Voting has now closed! Thank you to everyone who voted, discussed and donated. And of course to all the organisations who wrote marginal funding posts! 

Stay tuned for a post about the winners tomorrow. 

The Donation Election will close (no more voting or donating) at an undisclosed time today... could be in ten minutes, could be in ten hours... get your final votes in soon just in case!

This is fantastic, thanks so much for doing this! My only recommendation is to double down on your point of asking them to use charity evaluators (specifically GiveWell, maybe ACE and Giving Green), to decide which charities to include for each category (that way they feel bought into their choice of charity, and ideally they can change when recommendations do). 
Let me know if I can help in any way!