Imagine you came across a store offering the following options:

Blue Coffee Mug: $1

Red Coffee Mug: $1050

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After thorough inspection, you discover that both mugs are of precisely equal quality. The only difference in the mugs is their color. Which would you rather buy?

…I think nearly every person would — if they had to make the choice — prefer to buy the blue coffee mug. Even if red is your favorite color and the red coffee mugs are so more stylish than blue ones, the thousand-fold difference in the price just doesn’t seem to cut it, and red wins out in a landslide.

Now why does this matter? Because, I’d argue, the same kind of decisions are made when we donate, except most people make little effort to figure out which coffee mug is which. And instead of the downside being wasting your own money on a coffee mug that is far too expensive, the downside of this mistake is that people die who otherwise wouldn’t have to.

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Welcome to the second edition of Sunday Links! These are links! And this is posted on a Sunday! Makes sense so far, right? As a reminder, I may not agree with everything said in all of these links.

…Positional goods are things you spend money on solely to prove how rich you are. For example, buying a $2000 watch that isn’t any better than a $100 one. Peter Singer reminds us that such spending is somewhere between entirely wasteful and terribly evil. I wish more people could just go back to proving how rich they are by blowing it on ineffective philanthropy, because then it hopefully will take a lot less work to get them to channel it into effective philanthropy.

…In other Singer news, Peter Singer gives a talk about effective altruism. Luckily someone recorded it and put it on YouTube. …Too many of these awesome lectures aren’t on YouTube.

….There’s something a little suspicious about the p<0.05 threshold. Feel free to ignore this if you don’t know what “p<0.05” means, but definitely read this if you do. It’s for us statistics people. Speaking of which, psychology might be screwed for similar reasons.

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Many people think it would be nicer if people were to give more money to non-profits, especially effective ones. However, for most people, it doesn’t even occur to them that they giving a large share of their salary to charity is something that people actually can do, or that people are doing on a regular basis.

Being public with one’s pledge to donate not only spreads information about how easy it is to fight global poverty with a serious commitment, but that such commitments are the kind of thing that people can actually take. By being public with these pledges, we can actually inspire people to give, where they otherwise wouldn’t.

But how did people get stuck in a rut? Why doesn’t giving money come naturally? And how would public declarations help dig people out of this rut?

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I’ve noticed that quite a few people are interested in fostering communities – both creating communities and improving them to make them work together. But how do we go about actually doing this? What’s there to community that we can foster and build upon? What makes a community thrive, and how do we take advantage of this to make and/or improve communities?

To answer these questions, I turned to two books:

The first is The Penguin and The Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler. Benkler, in writing about cooperative systems (Penguins, named after the Linux Penguin) and hierarchical systems (Leviathans, named after Thomas Hobbes’s The Leviathan), studies the psychology, economics, and political science of cooperation and helps explain what makes communities stick.

The second is Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive by Bruce Schneier. Schneier studies trust and cooperation from a dizzying variety of sciences (psychology, biology, economics, anthropology, computer science, and political science). Schneier’s ultimate game is figuring out what is preventing society from falling apart, and that can be applied to building communities.

Let’s see what they got.

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As Peter Singer writes in his book The Life You Can Save: “[t]he world would be a much simpler place if one could bring about social change merely by making a logically consistent moral argument”. Many people one encounters might agree that a social change movement is noble yet not want to do anything to promote it, or want to give more money to a charity yet refrain from doing so. Additional moralizing doesn’t seem to do the trick. …So what does?

Motivating people to altruism is relevant for the optimal philanthropy movement. For a start on the answer, like many things, I turn to psychology. Specifically, the psychology Peter Singer catalogues in his book.

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Back on the old blog, I ran something I called the Weekly Link Roundup. I started about two years ago, and over the time, created 72 of them. I really valued this opportunity to share links not just to spread some of the great writing and videos around, but also catalog them for my personal reference. Here, I’m going to do the same, except it will be on Sundays. Hence, Sunday Links.

Remember that I don’t necessarily agree with everything stated in every article. Feel free to comment or ask.

In “Further Adventures in Being Biased and Bad with Money”, Scott Alexander explains a bias he noticed where he’d rather pay $200 for a flight with free internet and food than $150 for a flight where you have to pay $10 each for internet and food. It’s a bias that sounds really weird when I say it, but that I totally fall for in real life and would be worth exploring further. I think it’s a matter of how people construct “mental buckets” for spending, and $200 is totally reasonable for your “flight” bucket the same way $150 is, but $10 is not reasonable for your “food” bucket. Same reason why people will travel several miles to save $10 on gasoline, but not travel several miles to save $10 on a car.

Speaking of which, here are “Nine Ways Marketing Weasels Will Try to Manipulate You”, based on biases like that. Pricing bias is the most scary. But watch out for the mentions that “rationality can be cold, unemotional, and bad” (straw vulcanism) at the bottom of the essay.

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This website is about things that have worked for me. The “for me” part is key. This website isn’t about giving you advice, as much as I want other people to share in my lifestyle choices. Why? Well, first, I’m not nearly experienced enough to offer you advice. But second, the advice probably won’t work.

I have a theory, which Eliezer Yudkowsky also discovered, that many people will hunt through the web looking for tips on something: how to run, how to make a to-do list, etc., that optimize some part of their life. They’ll consider, say, five or six different approaches, and then they’ll finally find the one that works. And this is a magical moment that must be shared with everyone, because your dedication has unveiled the one method that works, and you can save everyone the time of trying the five other approaches that don’t work.

…Except you missed a step. You forgot to take into account that while people are rather similar, there’s enough individual differences in what people prefer, what makes people comfortable, how people think about things, etc., that what works for you might not work for other people. Indeed, all six of the approaches you consider probably have each worked for someone at one point or another, or they wouldn’t have been written about in the first place. No one, I hope, writes about failed self-improvement methods, unless… well… it’s about how those methods have failed.

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One hundred twenty-six days ago, I was overweight. I was 6’1” and 220lbs. I needed to do something, so I turned to was exercise. I started out trying to run. I could barely run half a mile before I got winded and had to stop. I couldn’t keep going. Now, 126 days later, I have run my first 5k. I didn’t do an official 5k or anything. I just ran the 5k distance (3.1 miles) – run away from my house, go 1.55 miles down the street, turn around, and run 1.55 miles back.

I had never run a 5k before. I had once been very close. I got all the way to 2.7 miles. But then I got injured for a week, sick for another week, and didn’t run for almost all of March. I tried running again after that, but I got tired after running just a mile, and I stopped. Eventually, after a bit more practice I worked my way back to being able to run 1.5 miles, but it still wasn’t going well. I was a long way away from being able to break the 5k barrier.

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Follow up to Resolutions Update - April Edition

On 2 Jan, I outlined my New Years Resolutions for this year. I also made sure to publicly commit to these resolutions, since public commitment is a powerful tool to build habits. But it wouldn’t work if I announced it once and then never talked about it again. Additionally, as time goes on, I learn more about how things are going and decide to update my resolutions. Therefore, I’m aiming to provide monthly updates on my progress. Here’s the one for May, following the one from April.

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Hi.

My name is Peter Hurford. Right now, I’m a software developer at Avant Credit, an online loan start-up in Chicago, IL. I’ve been enjoying the big city. Back in May 2014, I graduated from Denison University](http://www.denison.edu/), a small liberal arts college a little bit outside Columbus OH, with dual degrees in political science and psychology, and a concentration in organizational studies. If you want to know more about me as a professional, I have a personal website located at PeterHurford.com.

I used to write a blog called Greatplay.net for many years, starting blogging in 2009. In the fall of 2010, I read Richard Carrier’s Sense and Goodness Without God and Nicholas Everitt’s The Nonexistence of God. I can’t say that I believed in God prior to reading these books, but I definitely didn’t believe in God after reading these books, and I promptly shifted my blog to a large discussion of why that was the case. Philosophy of religion mattered a lot to me then, and I wrote about it frequently. Around this time, I got involved with the community website Less Wrong.

In the fall of 2011, things changed again. I read Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save, Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, and How Are We to Live. For the second time in my life, reading books changed everything. I continued to see some harm in religion, but this was dwarfed dramatically by the harms that come from factory farming and income inequality. I almost immediately resolved to stop eating meat and donate some of my income to effective non-profits in the third world.

Over the summer of 2012, I got involved in Felicifia, a utilitarian forum, and spoke to many of the people there. I joined Giving What We Can a little later, and pledged to donate 10% of my income. I kept reading books and learning more about organizations not just working to make the world a better place, but best make the world the best place – a movement called effective altruism.

Now, in the summer of 2013, I decided that it’s time to re-invent my blog and dedicate it to exploring these big issues in life. Therefore, you get Everyday Utilitarian, or my blog dedicated to my quest to become just that… an everyday utilitarian, or someone who seeks to put utilitarianism into their everyday life. This blog will definitely focus on the abstract debates you frequently see on philosophy blogs. But it will be a bit more than that. There will be self-improvement and lifestyle building as I craft my everyday utilitarianism. And there will be some discussion of science as it can help build utilitarian communities and answer deep questions about ethics. And there will be political commentary from my utilitarian perspective.

There are other self-improvement sites out there. But I don’t have all the answers, and I’m not out to give you advice. Instead, this blog is a personal blog about a journey, where I work on my life and give you updates on how things are going. And it’s about a particular kind of life – one that seeks to put utilitarianism into practice and make the world a better place. Hopefully you’ll take something out of it and enjoy it.

Let me know.

For more on the goals of this site, see “What Is Utilitarianism?” and “Don’t Take (My) Advice Too Seriously”.

For more on how I intend to achieve those goals, see my strategic plan and my careers plan.

For more about me, see “Why I Blog” and my personal website.