Hello! I'm Toby. I'm Content Manager at CEA. I work with the Online Team to make sure the Forum is a great place to discuss doing the most good we can. You'll see me posting a lot, authoring the EA Newsletter and curating Forum Digests, making moderator comments and decisions, and more.
Before working at CEA, I studied Philosophy at the University of Warwick, and worked for a couple of years on a range of writing and editing projects within the EA space. Recently I helped run the Amplify Creative Grants program, to encourage more impactful podcasting and YouTube projects. You can find a bit of my own creative output on my blog, and my podcast feed.
Reach out to me if you're worried about your first post, want to double check Forum norms, or are confused or curious about anything relating to the EA Forum.
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:
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:
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.
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!
Awesome, I'd love to chat when you're around in Oxford!