People often tell me that they encountered EA because they were Googling “How do I choose where to donate?”, “How do I choose a high-impact career?” and so on. Has anyone considered writing up answers to these topics as WikiHow instructionals? It seems like it could attract a pretty good amount of traffic to EA research and the EA community in general.
Some titles might change soon in case you can’t find them anymore (e.g., How to Reduce Animal Cruelty in Your Diet --> How to Have a More Ethical Diet Towards Animals, and How to Help Save a Child’s Life with a Malaria Bed Net Donation --> How to Help Save a Child’s Life from Malaria).
I’m interested in funding someone with a reasonable track record to work on this (if WikiHow permits funding). You can submit a very quick-and-dirty funding application here.
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.
To me that sounds like a project that could be listed on https://www.eawork.club/ . I once listed to translate the German Wikipedia article for Bovine Meat and Milk Factors into English cause I did not have the rights to do it. A day later somebody had it done. And in the meanwhile somebody apparently translated it to Chinese.
People often tell me that they encountered EA because they were Googling “How do I choose where to donate?”, “How do I choose a high-impact career?” and so on. Has anyone considered writing up answers to these topics as WikiHow instructionals? It seems like it could attract a pretty good amount of traffic to EA research and the EA community in general.
I recently published six new wikiHow articles to promote EA principles: How to Make a Difference in Your Career, How to Help Farmed Animals, How to Launch a High Impact Nonprofit, How to Reduce Animal Cruelty in Your Diet, How to Help Save a Child’s Life with a Malaria Bed Net Donation, and How to Donate Cryptocurrency to Effective Charities.
Some titles might change soon in case you can’t find them anymore (e.g., How to Reduce Animal Cruelty in Your Diet --> How to Have a More Ethical Diet Towards Animals, and How to Help Save a Child’s Life with a Malaria Bed Net Donation --> How to Help Save a Child’s Life from Malaria).
Three more are in the approval process (you have to wait a few days before seeing them): How to Fight Climate Climate Change by Donating to the Best Charities, How to Donate to the Most Effective Animal Welfare Charities, and How to Help the World’s Poorest People by Sending Money. I will publish some more articles in the following weeks.
Let me know if you have feedback on the articles, and I’ll be glad to improve them :)
Also, thank you for writing this shortform, as it inspired my mentor Cillian Crosson to ask me about writing these wikiHows :)
Best,
André
I’m interested in funding someone with a reasonable track record to work on this (if WikiHow permits funding). You can submit a very quick-and-dirty funding application here.
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.
To me that sounds like a project that could be listed on https://www.eawork.club/ . I once listed to translate the German Wikipedia article for Bovine Meat and Milk Factors into English cause I did not have the rights to do it. A day later somebody had it done. And in the meanwhile somebody apparently translated it to Chinese.