I choose the SENS Foundation, and have donated the $10 via Paypal. The transaction ID is #8YL863192L9547414, although I'm not sure how or whether that helps you verify payment. Maybe somebody can teach me how to provide public proof of private payment.
The SENS Foundation, as I understand it, is in the business of curing aging.
The reason why I chose the SENS Foundation is that I believe that, of the four options, it will do the most to convince people that rational thinking and empirical observation are worthwhile. This, in turn, is my best guess at what will reduce existential risk. Because I can't know, today, with any confidence what the most important existential risks will be over the next 50 years or so, I want my donations to nudge the world closer to a state where there are enough rational empiricists to successfully address whatever turn out to be the big existential crises.
Why do I think the SENS Foundation will promote science-y views? Basically, I think the most effective technique for getting irrational people to change their worldview is to prevent them with overwhelmingly compelling evidence that the world is hugely different from the way they imagined it to be. Ideally, the evidence would be emotionally uplifting and clearly attributable to the work of scientists. A manned flight to the Moon fits that bill. So would a cure for aging.
Although spiritualists and fundamentalists of all stripes have tremendous resources in terms of stubbornness, denial, and rationalization, it is harder to rationalize away a central fact of life than it is to rationalize away a peer-reviewed study from Nature that you read an excerpt of in the USA Today. You see the moon every night; people went there. It's hard to escape. More to the point, you don't want to escape. It's somehow really cool to believe that people can fly to the moon. So you maybe let go of your suspicion that the Earth is the center of the Universe and let your friend tell you about Newton and Galileo for a moment.
Same thing with aging. Your parents' friends are right there, 80 years old and still acting like they're 30. You can't help but be aware of the anti-aging cure. You can't help but be impressed, and think it's cool. You might still believe that mortality is a good thing, or that there's an afterlife, but you at least welcome medical science into your pantheon of interesting and legitimate things to believe in.
James Randi is a pretty bad-ass mythbuster, and I'm glad NCSE is fighting the good fight to keep "creation science" out of America's public schools. However many people they manage to convince of the importance of critical thinking, though, I think a cure for aging will convince even more. There's nothing quite like being WRONG about something you've always assumed was indisputably correct to make critical thinking look worthwhile. In this case, the bad assumption is "I will die."
As for Alcor, it's also a worthwhile cause, but it's an uphill battle to convince people that freezing themselves and waiting for the future is a way to cheat death. Curing aging is more straightforward, more user-friendly, and more useful in the event of a partial success -- if cryonics partially fails, you're probably still dead, but if an anti-aging cure fails, you're probably going to get another few decades of healthy life.
Thanks for the opportunity to choose, and to explain!
Ok. Matched donation.. Receipt ID is 4511-9941-6738-9681
Incidentally, I'm not convinced that major scientific accomplishments actually will serve to increase rationality. To examine the example you gave of the Moon landings, there is in fact a sizable fraction of the US which considers that to be a hoax. Depending on the exact question asked 5% to about 20% of the population doesn't believe we that people have gone to the Moon in the US, and the percentage is larger for people outside the US.See this Gallup poll and this British poll showing that 25% of ...
One of the things that makes Michael Vassar an interesting person to be around is that he has an opinion about everything. If you locked him up in an empty room with grey walls, it would probably take the man about thirty seconds before he'd start analyzing the historical influence of the Enlightenment on the tradition of locking people up in empty rooms with grey walls.
Likewise, in the recent LW meetup, I noticed that I was naturally drawn to the people who most easily ended up talking about interesting things. I spent a while just listening to HughRistik's theories on the differences between men and women, for instance. There were a few occasions when I engaged in some small talk with new people, but not all of them took very long, as I failed to lead the conversation into territory where one of us would have plenty of opinions.
I have two major deficiencies in trying to mimic this behavior. One, I'm by nature more of a listener than speaker. I usually prefer to let other people talk so that I can just soak up the information being offered. Second, my native way of thought is closer to text than speech. At best, I can generate thoughts as fast as I can type. But in speech, I often have difficulty formulating my thoughts into coherent sentences fast enough and frequently hesitate.
Both of these problems are solvable by having a sufficiently well built-up storage of cached thoughts that I don't need to generate everything in real time. On the occasions when a conversations happens to drift into a topic I'm sufficiently familiar with, I'm often able to overcome the limitations and contribute meaningfully to the discussion. This implies two things. First, that I need to generate cached thoughts in more subjects than I currently have. Seconds, that I need an ability to more reliably steer conversation into subjects that I actually do have cached thoughts about.
Below is a preliminary "conversational map" I generated as an exercise. The top three subjects - the weather, the other person's background (job and education), people's hobbies - are classical small talk subjects. Below them are a bunch of subjects that I feel like I can spend at least a while talking about, and possible paths leading from one subject to another. My goal in generating the map is to create a huge web of interesting subjects, so that I can use the small talk openings to bootstrap the conversation into basically anything I happen to be interested in.
This map is still pretty small, but it can be expanded to an arbitrary degree. (This is also one of the times when I wish my netbook had a bigger screen.) I thought that I didn't have very many things that I could easily talk with people about, but once I started explicitly brainstorming for them, I realized that there were a lot of those.
My intention is to spend a while generating conversational charts like this and then spend some time fleshing out the actual transitions between subjects. The benefit from this process should be two-fold. Practice in creating transitions between subjects will make it easier to generate such transitions in real time conversations. And if I can't actually come up with anything in real time, I can fall back to the cache of transitions and subjects that I've built up.
Naturally, the process needs to be guided by what the other person shows an interest in. If they show no interest in some subject I mention, it's time to move the topic to another cluster. Many of the subjects in this chart are also pretty inflammable: there are environments where pretty much everything in the politics cluster should probably be kept off-limits, for instance. Exercise your common sense when building and using your own conversational charts.
(Thanks to Justin Shovelain for mentioning that Michael Vassar seems to have a big huge conversational web that all his discussions take place in. That notion was one of the original sources for this idea.)