I’ve talked about .impact in a few other places, but now we’ve finally written a summary of it and have launched a new website. Look here to see what we’re up to!

“Introducing .impact”:

There are many project ideas that could be really useful for the effective altruist community. There are people with the skills and free time to make things happen but who lack guidance or support. .impact aims to provide infrastructure to get people and useful projects together. We hope to help volunteers learn useful skills, meet great people, and create something substantial.

We’re soon launching Skillshare.im, a place to share skills and services for free. We collaborated on several Trello boards to organize projects, research topics, and useful resources. We’ve brainstormed and started outlining projects like a vegetarian advocacy study, an EA wiki, and argument mapping software. We’ve had several weekly group hangouts and discussions with a variety of individuals. Most of our general discussion holds place in our Facebook group, which now has 114 members and seems to be growing organically at a rate of 5 per week.

Follow up to “New Years Resolutions: December Edition”

Well, happy new year, everyone!

Many people may come to this new year armed with new years resolutions. I, however, come armed with the resolutions I brought all the way from January 2013. I did it – a full year of (mostly) sticking to my new years resolutions.

In this essay, I’ll overview how I did in December, overview how I did in 2013 overall, and then set up resolutions for January 2014.

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“Five Ways to Instantly Become More Productive”: (1) Don’t multi-task; (2a) track how you spend your time; (2b) consider using apps like RescueTime, Self-Control, or Chrome Nanny; (2c) understand and be comfortable with struggling for the first couple of weeks, knowing it will make you better in the long-run; (3) only use online chat if you absolutely have to; (4a) turn off automatic email notifications; (4b) don’t check your email first thing; (4c) split your email into two folders, “Action” and “Non-essential” and automatically sort each email you get as you get it, coming back to the “Action” folder later; (4d) unsubscribe from as many things in your email as you can; (5a) declutter as much as you can; (5b) turn off as many notifications as you can; and (6) start slow. Ok, so that was actually way more than five things, but they’re all good advice and I follow most of them. For more, I wrote “How I Am Productive” and I’ve heard from a half dozen people now that they found it helpful.

Allison Smith, writing for the Animal Charity Evaluators blog whether protests hurt animal activism, citing a study that finds “participants were more likely to agree with the article when the author was an ‘atypical’ activist or was not described in activist terms at all”. This leads Smith to wonder whether activists are actually hurting the animal rights movement. I’d be tempted to think that, however, it’s important to have both hard-hitting activists and diplomatic atypical activists in the movement for reasons Greta Christina mentions about atheists and the LGBT movement in “Good Cop, Bad Cop: Atheist Activism”.

In similar news, Nick Cooney wants to change vegan advocacy from an art to a science. “Letter to a Young Matt” is also another good resource on the proper frame of mind that is needed for vegan advocacy.

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Awhile ago Donald Trump made a video offering to donate $5 million to charity if only Barack Obama would release his passport and college records. Of course, Barack Obama ended up refusing the offer, fueling Donald Trump’s long “conspiracy nut” belief that Obama wasn’t really born in America.

When the due date for the deal passed, however, Trump remarked how sad it was:

After the deadline came and went, Mr. Trump posted a video on YouTube calling it a “very, very sad day for the United States of America.” He suggested that the president’s snub prevented him from giving $5 million to a group such as the Wounded Warrior Project, American Cancer Society or to the families of victims from the embassy attack in Benghazi, Libya.

But there’s another way to think about this: why can’t Mr. Trump donate the $5 million anyway? Certainly, there’s no requirement that Obama do anything for Trump to donate his money. In a sense, Trump is playing the role of a terrorist – he has it within his ability to easily help the family of victims, wounded warriors, or people with cancer but chooses to hold these groups hostage until Obama gives into his demands.

But, of course, there seems to be a critical distinction between declining to help people with your money (allowing them to be harmed through your inaction) and actively holding people hostage (doing harm to them). However, the consequences are identical – regardless of whether Trump is refusing to make a donation or actively being a terrorist, the wounded veterans and family victims don’t get helped all the same. Utilitarianism, in focusing on the consequences of the act, doesn’t seem to recognize this critical distinction, commonly called the doing-allowing distinction.

In this essay, I aim to further explore utilitarianism by exploring the doing-allowing distinction.

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In Christmas, gift giving is important. However, it’s also important to take a moment to think about how the spirit of giving can be extended to those who don’t have enough money to afford Christmas. GiveDirectly is a new charity that will take any cash you donate it and give it directly, no strings attached, to extremely poor families in Africa.

While GiveDirectly is very successful, they don’t spend donors’ money on advertising, so they rely on people like me to spread the word about direct giving. GiveDirectly has been thoroughly vetted and is supported by multiple studies and is currently one of the three top recommendations of GiveWell, a very selective independent charity evaluator. Surprisingly, they’ve found that such transfers result in useful spending like buying food, investing in their homes, paying school fees, or increasing their savings. Very few recipients use it on alcohol or tobacco.

Additionally, the foundation Good Ventures has promised to match any donation to GiveDirectly, so any donation you give will be doubled! So far they’ve raised $1.7 million that will be matched dollar-for-dollar by Good Ventures, which translates into over $3 million that will be transferred directly to families living in extreme poverty. However, there’s still 40 days until the end of the matching challenge and $3.3 million in opportunity waiting.

If you’re able to, I encourage you take advantage of this opportunity to double the value of your holiday charitable giving. There’s no way to put into words what that will mean for the recipients.

This essay is a response to a comment on the Effective Altruist blog as well as a follow up to “Where I’m Giving and Why” and “Where I’ve Changed My Mind on My Approach to Speculative Causes”.

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Earlier I mentioned that my current plan for doing good via donations is to keep a line in my budget spreadsheet that specifies how much donations I “owe”, which currently will be 20% of my total income.

After cross-posting “Where I’m Giving and Why” on the Effective Altruism blog, commenter Brad asked me “Given all the uncertainties, do you honestly think that in 10 years’ time the choice of which charity(ies) to fund will be significantly clearer than it is today?”

My straightforward answer is yes. In fact, I see good giving opportunities improving right now and I expect to be donating large chunks again within a year, not within ten. But I wanted to take this comment seriously and give it a detailed response, since I think the case for saving is non-obvious and counter-intuitive.

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I’m really excited about the opportunity I have to use money to make the world a significantly better place. Furthermore, it’s a core conviction of mine that living an ethical and fulfilling life requires donating as much as one can spare to the best causes.

But what are those best causes? The only honest answer is that I don’t know. I think I have a good grasp of where the best causes aren’t, but a lot more research has to be done by myself and others before I can feel confident giving anywhere. Therefore, I’ve decided to donate very minimally and save my donations for later.

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Follow up to “New Years Resolutions: November Edition”.

Last January, I outlined some New Years Resolutions, and then did what I thought impossible – used the power of blogging, precommitment, and betting to actually stick to my plans. Following up my last report in November, I present my December update, which tracks how well I did in… November. Sorry that’s a bit confusing and that this was posted so late.

But anyways…

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So, the blog went dead again, which means it’s time to revive the blog with a run-down of all the non-blog things I’ve been doing recently.

I finished my seventh semester of college, which means I only have one more semester to go. I’m now on Winter Break, which means I get a free month to do whatever I want. This (probably) means more blogging!

I’ve done a lot more of the same – more career work (I have exciting news on this front forthcoming!), more EA projects work (we’re called .impact now), more volunteering (though I’ve now stopped working with Giving What We Can in order to focus more on other projects), and more learning programming (this week is the last week of the R course!).

Actually, that’s pretty much it.

It seems that if we’re good utilitarians and concerned about sacrificing in order to bring greater goods for others, we should spend every moment of our day agonizing over every purchase and how it could go further than others. But this is self-destructive and will make us less effective overall, as Julia Wise explains: “I think it’s good to go through a period of thinking that way. Just like when you live in another country for a while you start being able to understand prices without converting back to your own currency, when you start thinking about all your spending in Vaccination Currency or Mosquito Net Currency it becomes habitual. Your spending habits can’t help but be affected. I also think there’s only so much grief we can carry. I cannot go the next 70 years counting dead children on every receipt. I would break.”

“There’s Something You Need to Know About the Rules”: “This suggestion seemed to bring him great unease. The instructions were telling him to write his story in the notebook, and he had clearly written his on the paper instead. He was in violation of The Rules, and this was scaring him. I suddenly realized I had some teaching to do. It was time to share a deeper explanation of what The Rules really are, and I thought you might want to join in for the session as well. Because if you look around carefully, you will see that most of the problems of our society are based upon an incorrect understanding of these rules.”

“4:33” is a piece of music by John Cage that consists entirely of silence. It’s available on iTunes. The real question is why would people buy it?. The answer is a tale of how we don’t value things solely for what they do, but also for their history.

It seems like it could be more worthwhile than commonly thought to spend money on improving one’s ergonomics. And while we’re on the topic of applied rationality, here’s better house buying through knowledge of heuristics and biases.

Soylent is an artifical mixture of nutrients that supplies everything you need in a diet without actually requiring food. Here’s a good review from TIME.

The paradox of deontology: If a certain thing is bad according to deontology, why is it not ok to do that bad thing in order to cause even more cases of that bad thing from happening?

Turns out that much symbolism in many famous novels wasn’t intentional. Also, novelists can be a bit rude when responding to surveys.

Turns out that neither Democrats or Republicans are more racist than the other. Move along.

Sometimes we don’t have to make things complicated: a parable.