Have you had any bites on this project yet? I just had the misfortune of encountering the WikiHow entries for “How to Choose a Charity to Support” and “How to Donate to Charities Wisely”, and “How to Improve the Lives of the Poor”, which naturally have no mention of anything remotely EA-adjacent (like considering the impact/effectiveness of your donations or donating to health interventions in poor countries), instead featuring gems like:
“Do an inventory of what’s important to you.… Maybe you remember having the music program canceled at your school as a child.”
A three-way breakdown of ways to donate to charity including “donate money”, “donate time”, and then the incongruously specific/macabre “Donate blood or organs.”
I did appreciate the off-hand mention that “putting a student through grade school in the United States can cost upwards of $100,000. In some developing countries, you can save about 30 lives for the same amount,” which hilariously is not followed up on whatsoever by the article.
A truly obsessive focus on looking up charities’ detailed tax records and contacting them, etc, to make sure they are not literal scams.
I’m not sure that creating new Wikihow entries about donations (or career choice) will be super high-impact. We’ll be competing with the existing articles, which aren’t going to go away just because we write our own. And doesn’t everybody know that WikiHow is not a reliable source of good advice—at least everybody from the smart, young, ambitious demographic that EA is most eager to target? Still, it would be easy to produce some wikihow articles just by copy-pasting and lightly reformatting existing intro-to-EA content. I think I’m a little to busy to do this project myself right now, but if you haven’t yet had any applications I could try to spread the word a bit.
No applications yet. In general, we rarely get the applications we ask/hope for; a reasonable default assumption is that nobody has been doing anything.
Have you had any bites on this project yet? I just had the misfortune of encountering the WikiHow entries for “How to Choose a Charity to Support” and “How to Donate to Charities Wisely”, and “How to Improve the Lives of the Poor”, which naturally have no mention of anything remotely EA-adjacent (like considering the impact/effectiveness of your donations or donating to health interventions in poor countries), instead featuring gems like:
“Do an inventory of what’s important to you.… Maybe you remember having the music program canceled at your school as a child.”
A three-way breakdown of ways to donate to charity including “donate money”, “donate time”, and then the incongruously specific/macabre “Donate blood or organs.”
I did appreciate the off-hand mention that “putting a student through grade school in the United States can cost upwards of $100,000. In some developing countries, you can save about 30 lives for the same amount,” which hilariously is not followed up on whatsoever by the article.
A truly obsessive focus on looking up charities’ detailed tax records and contacting them, etc, to make sure they are not literal scams.
I’m not sure that creating new Wikihow entries about donations (or career choice) will be super high-impact. We’ll be competing with the existing articles, which aren’t going to go away just because we write our own. And doesn’t everybody know that WikiHow is not a reliable source of good advice—at least everybody from the smart, young, ambitious demographic that EA is most eager to target? Still, it would be easy to produce some wikihow articles just by copy-pasting and lightly reformatting existing intro-to-EA content. I think I’m a little to busy to do this project myself right now, but if you haven’t yet had any applications I could try to spread the word a bit.
No applications yet. In general, we rarely get the applications we ask/hope for; a reasonable default assumption is that nobody has been doing anything.