I spend most of my free time on my FIRST Robotics team. http://www.usfirst.org/
Dean Kamen founded FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) in order to try and increase interest in science and technology among school children. It does this by sponsoring robotics competitions at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.
Its oldest competition is the FIRST Robotics Competition, which is the one that my team participate in. Every year, FIRST releases a game that we have six weeks to design and build a robot to compete in.
It's basically trying to be an alternative to varsity sports teams, where instead of playing a game kids do engineering, and build technical skills before college (and it helps a lot in college admissions).
Insofar as it does that, it raises the sanity waterline, but not to a particularly high level. It does however, raise it for a lot of people.
It's not really a rationality organization per se, but it might be of interest to the community.
Some statistics about their total support from their site:
248,000+ students
22,475 teams
20,675 robots
66,000+ mentors/adult supporters
33,000+ event volunteers
Interesting things:
They've been very successful at getting sponsors, with more than 3,500 participating. FIRST has about $33,000,000 in operating expenses. But that doesn't reflect all of the money that it pulls in because of how many companies directly sponsor teams or provide scholarships.
It has a very decentralized structure, easy to scale
Dean Kamen does a few other things like technophilic TV shows and inventing
If anyone wants to hear more about it, just ask or something. I believe Randaly is also involved.
This post is prompted by a short discussion with Wei Dai. He says:
Perhaps we should get other causes to participate/recruit on LW? Actually, why aren't they here already? We have a bunch of individuals with non-SIAI interests, but no causes other than SIAI, despite Eliezer repeatedly saying that they would be welcome.
He has a good point!
Here's my plug, for the cause I spend lots of my time and energy on, Wikimedia/Wikipedia:
Wikipedia/Wikimedia is more analogous to a software project than an ordinary charity - your money is useful and most welcomed, but the real contribution is your knowledge.
Or, more generally: create educational material under a free content licence. If it's CC-by-sa, CC-by or public domain, it can interbreed and propagate.
(Then we need to fix the things wrong with the editor experience on Wikipedia ... though the Wikimedia Foundation is paying serious attention to that as well of late. In the meantime, if you find Wikipedia too personally annoying to participate in directly, writing your own site and CC-by-sa'ing it still helps a lot.)
What good causes can you think of that are relevant to LessWrong and its community, that leverage effectiveness through rationality? (I'm thinking beyond just legally-blessed charities, right down to the "small circle of conspirators" level of trying together to get something done.) As well as SIAI, LW has previously had plugs for GiveWell. What do you spend your time, effort and/or money on?