Improving the World

Helping get Effective Altruism Helsinki on its feet. To copy the report I posted on the EA forum:

Yesterday, me and two others ran the first bigger and more broadly marketed introductory EA event in Helsinki, Finland. We advertised it mainly on Facebook and on the mailing lists of a few student groups. Around 30 people showed up in total, many if not most of them new to EA.

The event consisted of two parts: an introductory lecture, where I compared PlayPumps with Deworm the World (borrowing the story from Will MacAskill's upcoming book) to help drive home the concept of EA and illustrate what the slogan "effective altruism combines the head and the heart" really means. Then I said a few words about different EA organizations, about how it's not just about charitable organizations but also things like 80,000 hours evaluating how to directly make the biggest impact on your life, and how I thought that EA is a really exciting idea.

The talk seemed to be well received and I got positive feedback of it later on. Then we ran a Giving Game, with my co-organizers having contributed 200 euros and The Life You Can Save sponsoring us by 5 euros per participant. I had picked Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, GiveDirectly, and Fistula Foundation as the three organizations to compare, on the basis of TLYCS having ready materials for them and them being sufficiently similar but also sufficiently different to make it meaningful and interesting to compare between them.

People seemed to find this an interesting question and quickly started talking about it. We used a format that had proven successful in our Less Wrong meetups, where we first told people to form groups of three or four, and then after some time asked them to new form new groups of a similar size to get new perspectives. In this case, it meant 15 minutes of discussion for the first groups, reform, and then another 15 minutes of discussion. After that we had people make their decisions and pick their favorite charity by filling an e-mail form on one of the two laptops brought by the organizers; they could optionally also give us their e-mail address if they wanted to stay in touch. People who were short on time could also leave earlier and make their decision as they left (we had placed one of the laptops by the door).

Another organizer has the exact figures, but as I recall, the results of the Giving Game had SCI as by far the most popular pick (around 80% support), with GiveDirectly the second (around 15%) and Fistula Foundation coming in third.

Altogether I'm quite happy with the event, and looking forward to organizing more local EA activities.

Trying to get FHI and CSER approved for gift matching by Google; I have money set aside to give as soon as this works out.

I want to share my parenting experience and knowledge. I think positive parenting is undervalued and many parents appear to have no structured idea of how to help their children develop all those interesting or necessary abilities - in an easy and fun way. I am under the impression that my own parenting efforts were quite successful, well-informed and non-demanding. I think one part of the success was to know about and have a plan for providing learning and development opportunities for my children for each week, month, year.

My idea is to share my approach and make suggestions for children of all ages available online. I am right now developing a platform which automatically suggests suitable activities based on the estimated developmental age and the ratings of prior suggested activities. I want to combine this with a wordpress based blog where the activities and other parenting posts can be discussed. I have also started collecting seed posts for the blog. I got the impression that some LW parents might like this idea and I'm wondering if and how my blog can be multilingual (I plan to write it primarily in German).

I'm interested in feedback about this idea and whether there are chances for possibe collaboration (guest posts, add-ons to the recommendation system, graphical design).

I am consistently pursuing a policy of releasing what I can under permissive OpenSource or OpenContent licenses. This includes educating my co-employees about copyright and legality and the whole OpenSource idea, in a fields where no-one ever considered it before (human language resources). I daresay I have been quite successful in educating them, less in actually persuading them.

My motivation is a bit on the ideology and idealistic side, but I sincerely believe that data should be free (and would make a better world). Though it is true that this does actually hurt a certain business segment and thus it is an open question what is the improvement/detriment ratio.

There's not much I can achieve with my current education level, but I give blood twice a year.

I am getting an education in hopes of getting a high-paying job, which I can use to earn large amounts of money and donate to an effective charity. I'm also a vegetarian and an aspiring vegan, but that's really more that I'm failing to make the world a worse place.

META

Comments about this topic or this thread belong here.

This might go against the grain: I advise people to think more about themselves than others.

Too often I see people working themselves to death with obvious symptoms of fatigue and stress helping their kith and kin beyond any reasonable measure. The more immediate case is the person trying to save something or someone from a fire and dying in the process. They would be better advised to think of themselves, raising their wellbeing and making others more self reliant in the process. Or more effective overall.

Promoting this cryonics/life extension/transhumanism convention in Laughlin, Nevada, next month:

http://venturist.info/conventions.html

I have to make some changes to the website, but we've confirmed cryobiologist Greg Fahy, Ph.D., as a speaker:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Fahy

And Maria Konovalenko:

http://mariakonovalenko.wordpress.com/about/

I may speak at the convention, but I have social anxiety issues and I don't know how I will hold up when the time comes.

Yeah, I find then some times we are concentrated on some global topics which are of course highly important, but we forget to do good for our very neighbours to start the chain( consider rewatching "pay it forward" movie)

oh, we can finally begin actually do smth?