I personally love strangers drowning but I don't think it's a centrally EA text. It's mostly about people who do good obsessively/ to serious extremes. I think it's interesting to people who care about doing good but it's not a manual in the way these other texts are. 

There have been a couple moments in my life when I've been pierced by someone else's suffering, before the "fat relentless ego"^[1] can catch up and mire everything in the soup of self-conscious self-reflective rationalisations. There is something true in those moments, and regular donation is a way to spread that truth out across time. 

I.e. I donate because suffering seems bad, and I make it a habit/ commitment because I'm not always thinking about the suffering of others. 

1. ^{^}

   Fantastic Iris Murdoch quote from The Sovereignty of Good. Great trio of essays, strongly recommended. The content is mostly orthogonal to EA commitments (Murdoch's version of doing good is quite blind to consequences), apart from the clearly serious striving to be good present across the essays. 

Last year @OscarD🔸 @Jason @huw pulled out some good insights. 

It looks like you might have to wait till tomorrow for a 'Donation Election Winners' post (though you can see the final votes on the banner). Until then - here are the anonymised votes to play with. 

Sounds awesome Tony. 
Pretty similar (from this high level description) to the work of Eleos AI. Have you guys connected? 

Reminder that if we reach $15K, we'll run a debate week of the Forum's choice. 
 

Thanks to an anonymous Forum user who notified me about a couple instances of vote brigading, some votes have been nullified. Those whose votes are nullified will be able to vote again. This does mean that the ranking on the banner has changed a bit (but not drastically). 

I'm not publicising the name(s) of the vote brigader(s) because this is mostly my bad - I didn't send as many clear reminders of the rules of the competition to orgs who joined late. As far as I know, no one deserves a reputational hit for this one (well, yep apart from me, sorry all!). 

The donation election 'I voted' flair (pictured below) was broken until last night. If you vote again it should be added to your account! 

(This is also a reminder that you can change your vote as many times as you like, and the deadline is Sunday)
 

Love this as a lock-in diagram. 

Years ago when I was working with Richard Fisher on The Long View, we were trying to come up with a good extended metaphor for lock-in. I was pretty stuck on the idea of a tilt-maze (which is intuitive but unfortunately the term means little to people reading). 

The problem with the tilt maze is that it is binary - you are either totally free to move the ball wherever, or you are trapped in a hole. Your diagram works much better - it intuitively gives you the idea of more and less sticky troughs. You could also represent a more binary lock in with a deeper valley. 

See: