Hey, this is fantastic! But I did want to point to something that helped me a lot, which purchase fuzzies and utilons separately. Personally, I find the most emotionally compelling cause to be euthenasia rights. I’m horrified by the fact that we are literally torturing people with terminal diseases for no reason. Despite how strongly I feel about this, I realized that this wasn’t where I was able to have the highest impact. It is hard to propagate the feelings I have about this cause towards causes I “know” are superior in impact, but it is something I strive to do on an ongoing basis.
Don’t let worry about this discourage you though. Doing something even with uncertainty is ALWAYS better than doing nothing just because of uncertainty.
Hi, I’m a CS student who is planning on earning to give. John Maxwell and I recently started a business (http://www.mealsquares.com) in order to try to improve on the default situation of software developer salaries. We figure we can accomplish several things with the entrepreneur route:
Give pretax dollars instead of post-tax salary dollars. (and hopefully more of them of course)
Spend more spare time working on effective things, for example helping out other EAs lower frictional costs that prevent them from being maximally effective.
Encourage the creation of other EA startups. We think there is some low hanging fruit in this space. (post on this forthcoming)
John and I are both highly interested in X-risk mitigation, which seems to suffer from a tragedy of the commons coordination problem.