Accomplishments Open Thread—June 2016
Publicizing our good deeds is really valuable for optimizing global flourishing. So please share any EA-themed accomplishments you have not yet shared on previous Accomplishment open threads, whether recent achievements or ones from long ago. This includes one-time accomplishments or ongoing activities on which you are continuously working. This thread is a completely safe space, with no social norms of “don’t be a braggart” applying—just share and be safe in your sharing. 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. Sharing about our goods deeds results in many benefits for the world:
1) Inspiring others to emulate some aspects of those good deeds through social proof and network effects.
2) Support each other doing good deeds through providing social connections, positive rewards, and warm feelings, which are vital forencouraging further pro-social activities.
3) Amplifying the signal about things you want others to know about, such as EA projects you are involved in, EA articles you published, etc.
P.S. The Accomplishments thread project is very open to optimization - besides sharing about your good deeds, please suggest ways to improve any aspects of it. For the history of previous Accomplishment Open Threads, see here and also this .impact FB discussion.
I took the Giving What We Can pledge last month. Prior to this I had an agreement with my wife that each of us could contribute 1⁄2 of 10% of our combined income to charities as we each see fit. This agreement has eliminated conflicts between us when trying to decide where to donate, but I realized it really wasn’t a firm commitment to actually donate. Also, I believe that signing the GWWC pledge will tend to have a positive effect on encouraging others to take the pledge.
Congratulations, this is both publicly beneficial, and provides a long-term commitment. How are you planning to share publicly about taking the pledge?
I’ve donated over $115,000 (all matched by various corporate foundations) 99% vegan for 5 years tutored urban youth for 2 years volunteered 2 years at a community homeless shelter secured food donations from multiple vendors for the homeless through a service organization at school: promoted food conservation, placed donation canisters in campus eateries, delivered food donations of surplus dining dollars to local food bank, planted trees, lobbied fraternities to support better charities, rented used graduation gowns, donating profits to charity, and introduced composting at a campus eatery.
Wow, great work! Thanks for all that you do.
I’m especially happy about a recent piece channeling the breaking news story about the Panama Papers to addressing global poverty issues. It was published in a prominent newspaper with over 420K subscibers to the paper version and over 5 million online viewers, so hopefully it will get some hits to EA charities. I’m also glad about another piece in this style I published on The Huffington Post, channeling recent attention about a charity scandal towards EA causes. These were both part of the Intentional Insights collaboration with The Life You Can Save, and were published also on the blog of TLYCS and on the InIn blog.
I interviewed Scott Weathers, an EA policy health expert, in the second video of the “Everyday Heroes of Effective Giving” series. These are meant to show the motivations of EA members, whether more dedicated ones or typical movement members, and show them as human beings to whom non-EA participants can relate. The aim is to share such videos widely to help promote EA-themed messages.
I wrote up, together with folks from the Local Effective Altruism Network, the EA Marketing Resource Bank on hackpad. It’s meant to provide resources on marketing to EA participants and effective charity staff. It’s a collaborative project between the Local Effective Altruism Network and Intentional Insights, with assistance from The Life You Can Save. We’re working on the first project for that, which is creating a marketing package for local EA groups that are just starting up, to help them do outreach.
Together with The Life You Can Save and the Local Effective Altruist Network, we at Intentional Insights wrote up the Secular Giving Games. I also went on a secular podcast to host the first Giving Game live on air. A nice piece of news on that front is that the International Humanist Ethical Union is looking to get involved, which will give an official stamp of legitimacy to Giving Games for secular/humanist groups around the world.
As part of the broader work of Intentional Insights to promote rationality—cognitive altruism—my post on Psychology Today climbed into the most popular place on that well-known website.
Finally, after attending the CFAR rationality training workshop, I wrote up a post from an EA perspective on my experience.
That’s what I wanted to share!
Thanks for sharing the post on CFAR workshop! It sounds like a valuable experience. Perhaps I will consider attending someday!
Congrats also on the success of your articles!
Thanks for the good words about my articles, and I hope you do have a chance to go to CFAR someday!
I proposed to start a fundraiser for GiveDirectly’s basic income project, which we just launched at EA Munich. Our goal is to raise (at least) $3,000.
Our group will participate in a large street festival here in Munich (called “Corso Leopold”) this weekend (11th and 12th of June) where we will reach hundreds of passersby and talk to them about EA (and hopefully convince them to donate to our fundraiser ;) ). We translated an EA flyer to German and will also have GWWC flyers at our stand. We will also have (speed) Giving Games, sponsored by The Life You Can Save.
We’re organizing a talk for the 23rd of June at the TU Munich by Jan Dirk Capelle from the EA Foundation. The topic will be “80,000 hours of maximum impact”. This will help us reach many students (we’re aiming for ~200).
My video interview for Intentional Insight’s series “Everyday Heroes of Effective Giving” was just released.
Nice to hear about all that you’re doing, exciting!
BTW, would you benefit from a flyer about EA-style animal activism or/and existential risk? We’re trying to figure out various needs for flyers for the EA Marketing Resource Bank project—let me know, and thanks!
Things I did this month:
started working on Giving Games for international humanists with Gleb
found people to do two EA workshops at the young Humanist conference EHYD
reposted an IHEYO newsletter article I wrote about veganism: https://facebook.com/groups/336234363178272/permalink/789638701171167/
helped out with Gleb’s idea of Secular Outreach: https://facebook.com/groups/1618780281766533/
created the EA Groups Directory and started an experimental project with Facebook likes: https://facebook.com/Effective-Altruism-Groups-Directory-1115652768455968/
rekindled an initiative with getting a Dutch Wikipedia page: https://facebook.com/groups/262932060523750/620445924772360/
started some ideas & connections for possible Dutch conference next year
got the Dutch Twitter page to 1,352 followers (started using account on 9 May) and set up automatic retweets & messages: https://twitter.com/EffectAltruisme
arranged Dutch Hangout call on EA marketing with Gleb: https://facebook.com/events/1236125569755666/
general social media posts & Dutch EA coordination with Sjir
Remmelt
That’s a lot of great work, thanks for all that you do!