If you’ve been planning to get around to maybe thinking about Effective Altruism, now is a great time to get consider making a commitment. As part of Giving What We Can's pledge campaign, people are signing the Giving What We Can pledge - to donate 10% of their future income to the charities they believe will do the most good in the world. It is based on the belief that we can make a real difference by thoroughly assessing evidence and contributing some of our resources to address the most pressing global concerns. The pledge is not legally binding, but is a public declaration of a lasting commitment to the cause. For anyone not ready to make the full commitment to taking the pledge, people are also signing up to 'Try Giving' as part of the campaign - where you commit to donate an amount for a finite time.
Last year in a similar event over 80 people took the pledge, which resulted in almost $19,000,000 being pledged to effective charities. To give you an idea of what this could achieve, a recent GiveWell estimate suggests that, if donated today to the Against Malaria Foundation, this amount could be expected to buy and distribute about 3.5 million bednets and avert the loss of almost 6700 lives (though there is much uncertainty around these figures).
If you think the campaign is a good idea and you'd like more people to hear about it, it would be a great help if you invited anyone you think would be interested in the event; also if you supported the campaign on Thunderclap. If you'd like to help out even more, then join our pledge event organisation Facebook group.
Any questions about the pledge, the campaign, or anything related are more than welcome.
About Giving What We Can: GWWC is a meta-charity which researches and evaluates charities on the basis of the impact they have, and also a community with GWWC chapters across the world. It is part of the Centre for Effective Altruism and was co-founded by a LessWronger.
It does not specify the charities - that decision remains under your control.
That's not completely true. The pledge does limit the charities that are elligble. The pledge is "I commit to donating % of my income to the most cost-effective charities."
Donating to charities that aren't cost-effective to get fuzzies or social status in your local community does not count.
True, though the decision of who is most cost-effective does remain for you to decide.
GWWC... was co-founded by a LessWronger, and in 2013 had verbal praise from lukeprog.
Boo ingroup bias.
It's more of a tactic to make sure people don't think "hey, another crackpot organisation" if they haven't already heard about them. I'm hoping to raise GWWC to the level of "worth investigating for myself" in this post.
If you’ve been planning to get around to maybe thinking about Effective Altruism, we’re making your job easier. A group of UK students has set up a drive for people to sign up to the Giving What We Can pledge to donate 10% of their future income to charity. It does not specify the charities - that decision remains under your control. The pledge is not legally binding, but honour is a powerful force when it comes to promising to help. If 10% is a daunting number, or you don't want to sign away your future earnings in perpetuity, there is a Try Giving scheme in which you may donate less money for less time. I suggest five years (that is, from 2015 to 2020) of 5% as a suitable "silver" option to the 10%-until-retirement "gold medal".
We’re hoping to take advantage of the existing Schelling point of “new year” as a time for resolutions, as well as building the kind of community spirit that gets people signing up in groups. If you feel it’s a word worth spreading, please feel free to spread it. As of this writing, GWWC reported 41 new members this month, which is a record for monthly acquisitions (and we’re only halfway through the month, three days into the event).
If anyone has suggestions about how to better publicise this event (or Effective Altruism generally), please do let me know. We’re currently talking to various news outlets and high-profile philanthropists to see if they can give us a mention, but suggestions are always welcome. Likewise, comments on the effectiveness of this post itself will be gratefully noted.
About Giving What We Can: GWWC is under the umbrella of the Centre for Effective Altruism, was co-founded by a LessWronger, and in 2013 had verbal praise from lukeprog.
Using terms that I picked up here which are not well known, or mean different things in different contexts
Also, I sometimes over pattern match arguments and concepts I've picked up on Lesswrong to other situations, which can result in trying to condescendingly explain something irrelevant.
I do something similar. I consistently massively underestimate the inferential gaps when I'm talking about these things, and end up spending half an hour talking about tangential stuff the Sequences explain better and faster.
Better framing: "Want to be Nick Bostrom's sidekick?"
... I'd take it.
I'd frame it as "Nick Bostrom needs Jeeves. Are you Jeeves?" (After P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster.)
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On introductory non-standard analysis, Goldblatt's "Lectures on the hyperreals" from the Graduate Texts in Mathematics series. Goldblatt introduces the hyperreals using an ultrapower, then explores analysis and some rather complicated applications like Lebesgue measure.
Goldblatt is preferred to Robinson's "Non-standard analysis", which is highly in-depth about the specific logical constructions; Goldblatt doesn't waste too much time on that, but constructs a model, proves some stuff in it, then generalises quite early. Also preferred to Hurd and Loeb's "An introduction to non-standard real analysis", which I somehow just couldn't really get into. Its treatment of measure theory, for instance, is just much more difficult to understand than Goldblatt's.