Accomplishments Open Thread—February 2016
Since the last Accomplishments Open Thread worked out well, we’ve decided to try out making it a monthly posting, and see how it works out.
This thread is meant for all of you as a completely safe space, with no social norms of “don’t be a braggart” applying—just share and be safe in your sharing. So please share any EA-themed accomplishments you have not yet shared on previous Accomplishment open threads, whether recent or not! Share as many or as few good deeds as you wish.
Please both share about your own good deeds and respond to what other people share with your authentic responses, ranging from upvoting to comments :-) Doing so will help motivate each other to greater accomplishments going forward and build capacity for the EA movement.
Now, sharing about our accomplishments may seek awkward at first, since it goes against social norms, but we in Effective Altruism know the benefit of trying out unorthodox approaches for good reasons. If we publicize our good deeds, we can gain many benefits, for ourselves and for the world.
1) Support each other doing good deeds through providing warm fuzzies/emotional support/encouragement;
2) See if we can help each other out;
3) Inspire others with the opportunity to emulate some aspects of those good deeds for ourselves;
4) Provide an opportunity to amplify the signal about things you want others to know about.
So please share about what you did!
P.S. This is an experiment, and is very open to optimization—besides sharing about your good deeds, please suggest ways to improve any aspects of it. Please take a look at the .impact discussion prior to doing so in case some points were raised and addressed there already :-)
In January the only EA activities I engaged in were Skyping with Gleb about possible volunteer work I could do for InIn and offering him some feedback on an article or two.
I also wrote down two EA-related ideas that have been on my mind in two blog posts, although it’s not clear to me that doing this actually did any good.
Tonight I completed about half of my Centre for Effective Altruism Pareto Fellowship application.
Good luck with the Pareto Fellowship!
Interesting ideas in your blog posts. For reducing existential risk in the short, medium, and long term, I personally see promoting rationality and EA as the most effective means to do so. I liked this recent piece here on how expanding our society’s circles of compassion can be particularly helpful. For the universes, I would create only ones where suffering is outweighed by pleasure.
Guess I’ll start.
Since last month, I published two EA-themed blogs for The Life You Can Save. “The Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives” describes how my wife and I started a new family tradition of giving each other donations to charities for Valentine’s Day. “How a Calculator Helped Me Multiply My Giving” talks about the Impact Calculator, a tool created by The Life You Can Save to calculate the actual impact of your donations to effective charities.
I plan to post these blogs to Intentional Insights and also submit them to The Huffington Post. More excitingly, a version of “The Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives” was accepted for publication to the 16th largest newspaper in the US, with a paper readership of over 400,000 for its Sunday edition, the only one that has op-eds, and over 5,000,000 monthly website visitors.
As President of Intentional Insights, I’ve also been in talks with the American Humanist Association to consider spreading Giving Games to their members, as part of a broader project with The Life You Can Save to spread EA-themed effective giving to reason-oriented communities. The AHA is pretty interested in this project, and will likely host a Giving Game for their staff, which is a great sign that they will spread it to their groups.
On a personal note, I’m also looking forward to Valentine’s Day myself, and giving donations to effective charities on my wife’s behalf, per our Valentine’s Day tradition. Not saying here which charity I’ve picked, since she may read this post, and it’s supposed to be a surprise :-)
This seems like a good idea! Gleb, perhaps you should collect your EA outreach activities (e.g., the ‘Valentine’s Day Gift That Saves Lives’ article) under such a monthly thread, since the content might be too well-known to most of the participants of this forum?
Oh, thanks for the idea! This might work well.
After wanting to for about a year, I finally started taking notes during Stanford Effective Altruism meetings.
Nice, could be a useful model for other local EA groups to adopt as well.
Generated a new EA idea. Readers, please let me know what you think:
EA Ventures once reported that conflict resolution mechanisms are important for project success. I have yet to participate in a project that has discussed conflict resolution. Should we have an independent effective altruism dispute resolution system? For example, a ″court″ of sorts that EA project teams could contractually bind themselves to in order to resolve conflicts in pre-specified ways? Retrospectively, group’s working on EA related projects could refer to the advice of the court for independent guidance. A complementary investigatory service could be established to investigate matters of interest to the court, for instance, misuse of funds.
What sort of issues might such a court help resolve?
The idea of a “court” is a bit too formal for me. Maybe an idea can be to have an EA “mediator” who would perform this function? Depending on the amount of work involved, they may even be paid by the respective parties.