Looking around at the way philanthropy has been presented in various articles, books, and conference speeches, I keep noticing two different approaches to social change:

The “Just Do It!” Approach: In this approach, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. So why not take a bunch of shots at once, learn from the failures, get up, and try to do it again? This approach has the catchphrase “innovation” and it emphasizes lofty goals (end world hunger now!), trial-and-error, and going big or going home. I see this approach being personified by an organization like “The Case Foundation”, or in an article like “It’s Time to Be Fearless”.

The “Study Everything Before Doing Anything” Approach: In this approach, you have to look both ways before crossing the street. You can’t just run off and expect to solve the social problem without putting in a bunch of time to understand it first. This approach has the catchphrase “measurement” and emphasizes academia, careful analysis, and spending a lot of time thinking before rolling out some specifically targeted action. I see this approach being personified by an organization like GiveWell, or in an article like “Six Theories of Change Pitfalls to Avoid”.

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I’m pretty down on the concept of a Presidential “debate”, or just how Presidential election marketing works in the first place. Politics seeks to answer a very important normative question of “how ought the world, or at least our nation, be?”. But in a debate that allocates a whopping two minutes per candidate to settle the enormous question about the role of the government, I don’t think due diligence is being done.

But there’s a bigger concern. It’s not just that people think that a discussion on the role of government can be done in two minutes, it’s that people are so confident about their own opinions on the role of government that they don’t notice anything is missing.

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Some people wonder why it takes so long to explain a point. Why can’t I just explain utilitarianism in a couple of sentences, or just one essay? Why do they need to read so much? The answer is because of the problem of large inferential distance which I first encountered in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essay “Expecting Short Inferential Distances”. I will now, ironically, explain the concept of inferential distance in just one essay.

To start explaining, I begin with an analogy: Imagine trying to explain to a young-earth creationist why evolution is viewed as so obviously true. I don’t do this to say that you’re the obviously wrong creationist and I’m the noble biologist out to explain science to you that you just don’t get because you’re stupid. That’s not an accurate description of where we stand (nor is it an accurate description of where creationists stand). It’s just a good example to explain my point – bear with me.

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I’d like to get better at debating charitably. This guide is a good place to start.

Just a reminder that Immanuel Kant had non-progressive atypical-by-modern-standards views; like women don’t have rights; children born out of wedlock don’t have rights; homosexuality and masturbation are abhorrent; and organ donation (and even hair donation) is basically partial suicide (and suicide is very wrong, by the way). I’m not sure how much of a reductio ad absurdum this is for Kantian deontology, but it is a prime example of how easy it is to make your moral theory conveniently confirm the standard cultural practices and biases of your time. (I don’t think utilitarianism is off the hook for this, but it certainly has a better track record.)

80,000 Hours tells me about two things that are dangerous that I didn’t think were dangerous: charity fundraisers (because they tend to shift donations around rather than outright raise donations, though see many caveats and clarifications) and attractive people (because they’re more persuasive when they shouldn’t be, though my girlfriend should be excluded from this).

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One interesting idea comes from “How Students Can Support a Millennium Village?”, which talks about, obviously, funding a Millenium Village: (See also the school’s news report.)

Last year at Carleton University our group, Students To End Extreme Poverty, worked to get a question to referendum where students voted on whether or not they would all have to automatically pay an additional $6 in tuition fees ($5352 instead of $5346) to help support a Millennium Village. It worked. Carleton students now contribute over $110,000 annually.

Here is our hope: By getting enough universities and organizations to support Millennium Villages (aside from helping a couple communities help themselves out of extreme poverty) it would raise enough awareness, get enough media attention, engage enough people, foster enough cooperation, and generate enough civil society will to see policy changes: more and better aid, fairer trade, and debt cancellation.

Worst case scenario: thousands of people, many of whom would otherwise be dead, will have the basic tools they need to lift themselves out of extreme poverty.

Might this be a plausible thing to try and do on other college campuses?

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As I mentioned in my strategic plan, I have 10 months and 29 days until I graduate from Denison University and hopefully will be transitioning to a career. Careers are important because having one will not only mean that I won’t starve, but that I’ll have an opportunity to change the world. As the career advice organization 80,000 Hours notes you’ll be spending about 80,000 hours in a career, so you might as well use it to make as big of a difference as you can? But what career should I pick?

Here are my starting thoughts and strategy…

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My New Years Resolutions have been greatly boosting my day-to-day behaviors so that I become the kind of person that has good diet, good fitness, and good productivity. However, I’ve decided that I want to not just focus on my day-to-day, but my behaviors from “30,000 feet” or “year-to-year”, so to speak. I want to set goals and be more strategic.

This is the essay where I do some goal setting for the next year. Right now, I think I’ll commit to revising this plan every six months (November and May), but I reserve the right to change that.

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Why blog? In Harry Potter, Dumbledore stores his thoughts in a pensieve. However, such magical technology already exists for us in a less awesome form: diaries and blogs.

The desire to blog nearly has always started with me feeling overwhelmed by having too many thoughts in my head. I notice that I can’t think clearly, because focusing on one thought in particular ends up with me losing some of my other thoughts. This creates a somewhat unpleasant feeling and loss of focus.

But the pensieve model brings a solution – I can make use of what has been called by certain academics as an “external memory field”, and by most nearly everyone else as “paper” or “word documents” to type up my thoughts. Then, I can get rid of my thoughts from my (internal) mind and think without worry of loss.

Spencer Greenberg writes that it’s rather pointless to try to read non-fiction with the intent to learn unless you’re also taking notes, potentially doubling the effectiveness of your time spent reading or more. Since I read a lot of books, it would behoove me to summarize what I’ve read to make sure that I actually learn the material.

I can then come back to thoughts that I’ve stored days, weeks, months, or years older and retrieve them. It’s really fun to read what I wrote a year ago and try to shift back into my old frame of mind. Sometimes, old writing of mine is as unfamiliar to me as the writing of other people.

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I went into a CVS and found strange locks on all of the Tide detergent containers that needed to be unlocked at the register during purchase. I was really confused, until I read that Tide is drug currency.

Yet another essay on why social science needs to publish replications.

Perhaps we should go to Mercury for a colony rather than Mars? Mercury has very reasonable underground temperatures and much better prospects for solar power than Mars.

Alonzo Fyfe says what I’ve been thinking about whether it makes sense to have a “right to remain silent”. Presumably, if the person is guilty, and they have some sort of evidence of their own guilt, than shouldn’t they ought to be compelled to provide that evidence, given that it helps put punish a guilty person? The problems, then, are really in the nature of the coercion and whether this coercion would negatively effect innocent people enough as to be worth it. But that seems better stopped by outlawing “cruel and unusual tactics” and regulating interrogation better. To be clear, I’m not saying I don’t like the “right to remain silent”, just that I can’t currently make sense of it.

As far as elections go, the Papal election would be pretty hard to hack. …Though I don’t think all the pomp, circumstance, and colored smoke would go over well in the Presidential election.

How panhandlers use free credit cards.

A quick overview of meta-ethics as good as any lengthy textbook.

Does studying economics make people selfish?. Seeing an article with that question as the headline leads me to invoke Betteridge’s law of headlines and know in advance the answer is “no”, but it was still a good read to find out why.

A good analysis of asking “how else do you explain it?”.

Julia Wise explains what it’s like to give away 50% of her pre-tax income.

My friend Robert Moore analyzes the relationship between the estate tax and a meritocracy.

Follow up to Giving Now Currently Seems To Beat Giving Later

Thinking about analyzing cost-effectiveness for vegetarian outreach, has made me think more about where philanthropic dollars should go in order to do the most amount of good. Most people just give to whatever charities come their way, send them advertisements, etc. A lot of people are also concerned with giving back to their local community, supporting their church, or their university.

I don’t condemn any of those motivations – I think they’re wonderful, local communities do deserve support, and there’s something to be said for “paying it forward” and giving back to those who have set you up for success. But I’m mostly concerned with what one should do with the goal to improve the world as much as possible (on the assumption that all interests count equally), and I’ve changed the way I think.

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