(This will be mainly of interest to Effective Altruists, and is cross-posted on the Giving What We Can blog, the Intentional Insights blog, and the EA Forum)

When I first started donating, I did so anonymously. My default is to be humble and avoid showing off. I didn’t want others around me to think that I have a stuffed head and hold too high an opinion of myself. I also didn’t want them to judge my giving decisions, as some may have judged them negatively. I also had cached patterns of associating sharing about my good deeds publicly with feelings that I get from commercials, of self-promotion and sleaziness.

I wish I had known back then that I could have done much more good by publicizing my donations and other goods deeds, such as signing the Giving What We Can Pledge to donate 10% of my income to effective charities, or being public about my donations to CFAR on this LW forum post.

Why did I change my mind about being public? Let me share a bit of my background to give you the appropriate context.

As long as I can remember, I have been interested in analyzing how and why individuals and groups evaluated their environment and made their decisions to reach their goals – rational thinking. This topic became the focus of my research as a professor at Ohio State in the history of science, studying the intersection of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, and other fields.

While most of my colleagues focused on research, I grew more passionate about sharing my knowledge with others, focusing my efforts on high-quality, innovative teaching. I perceived my work as cognitive altruism, sharing my knowledge about rational thinking, and students expressed much appreciation for my focus on helping them make better decisions in their lives. Separately, I engaged in anonymous donations to causes such as poverty alleviation.

Yet over time, I realized that by teaching only in the classroom, I would have a very limited impact, since my students were only a small minority of the population I could potentially reach. I began to consult academic literature on how to spread my knowledge broadly. Through reading classics in the field of social influence such as Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and Made To Stick, I learned a great many strategies to multiply the impact of my cognitive altruism work, as well as my charitable giving.

One of the most important lessons was the value of being public about my activities. Both Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion and subsequent research showed that our peers deeply impact our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We tend to evaluate ourselves based on what our peers think of us, and try to model behaviors that will cause others to have positive opinions about us. This applies not only to in-person meetings, but also online communities.

A related phenomenon, social proof, illustrates how we evaluate appropriate behavior based on how we see others behaving. However, research also shows that people who exhibit more beneficial behaviors tend to avoid expressing themselves to those with less beneficial behaviors, resulting in overall social harm.

Learning about the importance of being public, including in online communities that reach far more people than in-person communities, especially by people engaging in socially beneficial habits, led to a deep transformation in my civic engagement. While it was not easy to overcome my shyness, I realized I had to do it if I wanted to optimize my positive impact on the world – both in cognitive altruism and in effective giving.

I shared this journey of learning and transformation with my wife, Agnes Vishnevkin, an MBA and non-profit professional. Together, we decided to co-found a nonprofit dedicated to spreading rational thinking and effective giving to a broad audience using research-based strategies for maximizing social impact, Intentional Insights. Uniting with others committed to this mission, we write articles, blogs, make videos, author books, program apps, and collaborate with other organizations to share these ideas widely.

I also rely on research to make other decisions, such as my decision to take the Giving What We Can pledge. The strategy of precommitment is key here – we make a decision in a state where we have the time to consider their consequences in the long term, and specifically wish to constrain the options of our future selves. That way, we can plan within a narrowed range of options and make the best possible use of the resources available to us.

Thus, I can plan to live on 90% of my income over my lifetime, and plan to decrease some of my spending in the long term so that I can give to charities that I believe are most effective for making the kind of impact I want to see in the world.

Knowing about the importance of publicizing my good deeds and commitments, I recognize that I can do much more good by sharing my decision to take the pledge with others. All of us have friends, and the large majority of us have social media channels and we all have the power to be public about our good deeds. You can also consider fundraising for effective charities, and being an advocate for effective altruism in your community. 

According to the scholarly literature, by being public about our good deeds we can bring about much good in the world. Even though it may not feel as tangible as direct donations, sharing with others about our good deeds and supporting others doing so may in the end allow us to do even more good.

From the sociological point of view I cannot imagine a world without compulsory, god declared, laws for basic behaviors, such as sex-related, murder-related, and god-worship related behaviors. My outlook comes from my certainty that some minds are susceptible to the seeking of such compulsions, and my certainty that some other minds are susceptible to a need to supply such compulsions, sometimes as themselves as the authority, and sometimes as representatives of higher authority. The latter group always seems to produce some very successful iterations, from Moses to Jim Jones. . . As it is said in commerce, if there is demand, there will always be folks who will make it a life quest to supply that demand.

If what I'm saying has bases in fact, and if the atheistic challenge is to disenfranchise, dis-empower, organized religion, and other publicists of drivel, then how can mere logical, rational, rhetoric be looked to in order to bring about this goal? It seems evident to me that such rhetoric does not have the needed determinants to effect the goal. Rationality cannot seem to supply the needed compulsions. Thus, rationality goes unheeded.

I have an idea for a possible solution. What if we successfully substituted a new word for truth. What if it became common to say VERIPOOP in place of VERITAS? From that small acorn might grow reexamination of the human faculty for knowing, and claiming truth. It should be obvious to all, that we humans do not have a truth-knowing faculty. We can only know human level truth, which is always temporary and finitely circumscribed. Grass was known to be green for a long time in history, but, as we all know, green is not a property of grass any more. Nature supplies color only to those who are not color blind. Greenness is a human thing, not a grass thing. Reflecting white light at a certain wavelength is intrinsic to grass, but not color. We humans can know only truth that is bound to change in time, but "real" truth cannot change. It is already truth. Where else could it go?

Yes, there are mathematical proofs that would present themselves as truth forever. But it's easy to overlook the fact that all scientific and mathematical pronouncements are abstracts of reality. They may be correct within the confines of the postulates that undergird them, but reality is greater than any finite number of postulates. Further, postulates are arbitrarily chosen. Parallel lines may never meet, or always meet, or meet just under specified specified conditions. Therefore, that which is correct is not necessarily truth.This is a fact about the human knowledge horizon, the human condition. The horizon, wherever one draws it, however far we might advance in knowledge, is inexorably there. Yet the wild eyed compulsion addicts are willing to die for what? Why it's their "truth," of course. So, I say that the very word needs to be expunged, because, amazingly, every time it is uttered, it presents a lie. It claims that someone has corralled truth.

VERIPOOP would put us in our place. A new appreciation may develop of the human knowability horizon. How can one be an extremist when one knows that what one proclaims with vehemence is VERIPOOP? It seems to have a calming effect. Scientific veripoops are wonderful. The fact that presently the scientific method doesn't allow truth to be considered truth forever, as it did when science was in the hands of the compulsive knowers of Europe, (e.g. the Galileo problem), is also wonderful. But there is no other word available currently. Science must call its temporary findings truth, especially on true or false tests. Yet the facts show that they are a step down from truth. They are VERIPOOP!