Maybe this should be posted in Discussion? That way more people will see it.

Great offer.

Would you consider extending the offer to MIRI, Living Goods or Development Media International (for those unfamiliar: the first being the AI organisation that sponsors this website, the last two being 2 of GiveWell's standout charities?

Comprehensive, evidence-based toolkits for policy makers and planners on Improving Educational Quality through Interactive Radio Instruction exists. Development Media International is one of GiveWell's standout organisations and implements radio-based behaviour change health education to "save the greatest number of lives in the most cost effective way.

GiveWell's most compelling reason for not including Living Good's as one of their 4 recommended charities is room for more funding. However, the premise for the lack of room for more funding rested on the assumption that it would be funded by a big donor soon. There is no evidence to suggest this has taken place since GiveWell's analysis.

The size of Living Goods' funding gap for the next year is highly uncertain because major funders are considering supporting the program. If Living Goods raises enough funds to scale up the program studied with the RCT, it may allocate additional funds to programs with less of a track record.

I favour living goods since their approach doesn't disincentivise rational market behaviour and there are methodological issues re: the effectiveness of the 4 recommended GiveWell charities that are described elsewhere.

I favour DMI for complex reasons including the integrity of their frontier scientific methodology which I may elaborate upon at a later stage. They do their work very well but I still have concerns that it may be increasing the survivability of those who neglect somewhat easily researched solutions to everyday problems and therefore sustain unwellbeing in the long term.

Update: I have been doing some thinking about making a bequest, prompted by this offer. So, suddenly the urgency of donating feels less great to me, and dying with savings is suddenly valuable. When I think about how to maximise my savings, one thing that comes to mind is maximising my inheritence. My sister rents a house from my parents below market price. I feel like this is unjust, since it will take away from the some of my inheritence. She is a wealthy quant and just 'doesn't have the time or need' to change arrangements. I feel bad about this, like I'm being robbed or they are favouring her. At the same time, I'm not entitled to their money. This is stressful!

When I was 16, I spent a lot of time "analyzing signals", and it never went well.

To address your first question: this has to do with scope insensitivity, hyperbolic discounting, and other related biases. To put it bluntly, most humans are actually pretty bad at maximizing expected utility. For example, when I first head about x-risk, my thought process was definitely not "humanity might be wiped out - that's IMPORTANT. I need to devote energy to this." It was more along the lines of "huh; That's interesting. Tragic, even. Oh well; moving on..."

Basically, we don't care much about what happens in the distant future, especially if it isn't guaranteed to happen. We also don't care much more about humanity than we do about ourselves plus our close ones. Plus we don't really care about things that don't feel immediate. And so on. Then end result is that most people's immediate problems are more important to them then x-risk, even if the latter might be by far the more essential according to utilitarian ethics.

Also see this reply by econblogger Noah Smith.

Solution: get an eBook edition or get a used hardcover and take off the dust jacket.

Also, it's not going to make you meaner than the general population. It just teaches you how to do consciously what some people can do unconsciously.

If it's morally good for me, as an autistic person, to improve my social/manipulation skills such that they're closer to the average NT, then why would it be immoral for you to improve your social skills? Unless there's some morally optimal level of social skills that is quite conveniently the level of the average person, this seems strange.

This seems like a very good idea, but I'm not sure that it fills the same role as the traditional Pomodoro (grain of salt: still new to Pomodoro).

One of the problems that I find when programming (and a lot of other tasks, really) is that it's easy to get wrapped up in "how do I implement this?" instead of "What do I need to implement to achieve my goal?". This is especially problematic when it becomes even finer scaled - "I need to understand/rework this one little part because maybe it's causing the current bug/error" instead of "what is the most time-efficient way for me to try to solve the current bug/error". I've spent many hours banging my head against a wall trying to implement/fix something that was ultimately unimportant. Your technique here seems to be a great solution to this problem - frequently pulling out of tactical mode to think strategically, (plus making sure that you're fed etc, which has a huge impact on my work efficiency).

On the other hand, my impression with the Pomodoro technique is that part of the goal is to make it easier to stay motivated - it's much easier for me to sustain a decent pace of work for a day when I know that every 20 or 25 minutes I'm going to have a 5 minute break to do something fun. I'm looking forward to trying your modification, but I'm wondering if, at least for myself, I'm going to need an additional five minutes to just do something fun (at least if I want to be able to keep up my work all day long). Although, as you point out, 15 minutes is actually a long time, and maybe only 10 minutes of it is really necessary for the strategic thinking and body maintenance stuff.

Found another helpful addition to the gmail part of the system - install google lab "Multiple Inboxes", and add an inbox for "Action" and an inbox for "Waiting" (or whatever labels you use for those categories). I set mine to show below the main inbox. So now whenever I go to gmail, I see my inbox, whatever "action" emails I need to deal with, and whatever emails I'm waiting for a response on. It helps make sure I don't forget about my "processed" emails.

What modifications? I really like the pomodoro technique (so far - still in the novice stages of using it), but its rigidity doesn't lend itself well to a lot of tasks that I deal with - reading papers and writing code, mainly. In both cases, it takes a lot of work to wrap my head around things, and I lose that if I take a break at the wrong time. So when I'm doing those tasks, I'm breaking off chunks that roughly correspond to 20 minutes (like a sub function of code, or reading the intro and methods of a paper), and working until I hit that milestone. When I'm doing something where it doesn't matter when I take breaks, I'm trying to follow the pomodoro technique more exactly.

Other than that... I'm actually not sure that I'm doing much that's very different. I think that may have been a reflexive addition of fudge factor. Although I reserve the right to make further modifications.

Oh - one minor addition to the Eizenhower matrix. I'm trying to follow a common rule in the academic world, that every day you should spend at least an hour working on the project that is closest to completion. Which is just a way of weighting things within the "Important" row.

Thank you for such a comprehensive (and immediately useable) guide. I just thought I would throw out one of my favorite aspects of Gmail - shortcut keys. You can turn them on through [gear symbol] > Settings > General > Keyboard shortcuts. I'd also recommend turning on Auto-advance (also in Settings > General, I like it at "Go to the Previous (older) conversation"). [EDIT: to enable Auto-advance, I believe you need to first enable the lab in [gear symbol]>Settings>Labs>Auto-advance]

With these two things on, the actual processing part of emails is incredibly fast. Hitting 'e' immediately archives the current email (removing it from the inbox but leaving it searchable), and opens the next oldest email. Hitting 'v' opens the "move to" tab, and you can start typing your folder (say, "action") to select the folder, then hit enter to move it. In combination, these mean that actual maintaining of your email structure takes only a few keystrokes per email. There are a number of other handy shortcuts ('r' to reply, for example), but most of the time saving for me is in "archive" and "move to"

I'm about a week into trying out this system (with some modifications), and it feels really, really good.