Accomplishments Open Thread - April 2016

Thanks to Gleb_T for encouraging me to contribute to this thread. I am new to the forum and relatively new to the EA movement. I'd like to share an agreement I made with my wife regarding giving. It has enabled us to give more and has reduced some conflict in our marriage. I hope it might be useful for others as well. Since we view all of our finances as jointly owned, we always discuss spending, unless it is within some automated account. We would discuss charitable donations on a case-by-case basis, so when one of us wanted to make a donation we would bring it up and present our case. Since we don't always agree with each other, this was an obstacle to our giving. To resolve this, we have agreed to give away 10% of our pre-tax income annually, with each of us having separate control over half of the total. That way we can each give to our favorite causes without having to seek agreement from the other. Also, we have a fixed budget for giving. Of course, if we both agree, we can give more than the total of 10%. So far it has worked well. We have donated to Action Against Hunger and Intentional Insights, and there will be more to come.

Hi everyone,

First comment for me here.

This is not really an accomplishment yet but I wanted to share with you a proposal for a Stack Exchange Q&A on Effective Altruism that I just put together at http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/97583/effective-altruism.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Stack Exchange (SE), http://stackexchange.com is the number one network for Question and Answer (Q&A) worldwide, with websites’ topics ranging from Philosophy, to Computer Science, all the way to Cooking and Outdoor activities.

The way new SE websites are created is through SE’s “staging zone” at http://area51.stackexchange.com. There, websites covering new topics are proposed and go through different test “phases” before possibly becoming part of the SE network.

The Effective Altruism proposal is currently in the “Definition” phase, and is described as a

“Proposed Q&A site for donors and impact evaluation professionals to discuss scientific evidence on the most effective ways to improve the world.”

The goal of the definition stage is precisely to refine this description, and to identify the kind of questions that would be amenable for the site, and the kind of questions that would not.

If you want to join the discussion and help to the creation of the Effective Altruism SE website, feel free to create an account at http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/97583/effective-altruism, follow the proposal, and propose/vote on example questions.

Any help spreading the word about this project and attracting new supporters is also welcome.

PS : I want to stress that, in my views, an EA-SE website is not meant to replace or compete with the EA-forum. On the contrary, I think the two would be very complementary. People on the EA-forum publish great blog-like content. A EA-SE website would be exclusively dedicated to short Q&A (post which do not fit into the Q&A format are quickly closed by moderators on SE websites). The EA-forum is acknowledged and advertised on the EA-SE proposal (http://discuss.area51.stackexchange.com/questions/23430/the-effective-altruism-forum)

There's been another edition of the Effective Altruism Boot Camp held in Cracow, Poland. We have doubled in size and set off for regular project work. It's thanks to many months of hard work of these folks: Aga Pisz, Aneta Błachewicz, Marcin Kowrygo, Marcin Woźniak. Thank you!

I'm doing direct work in animal advocacy, and the organization/network where I organize (Direct Action Everywhere) implemented its dashboard of process metrics that I've worked on and tried to help theorize this month. Very exciting to finally put EA principles into action.

Also, I do research on global poverty with Innovations for Poverty Action, have been living in Ghana for ten weeks for a project for the first time and I don't have a concrete accomplishment except to say that I now have feelings and experiences to motivate me to follow my beliefs about effective altruism even more.

Thanks for the post, Gleb!

Our EA Munich team just gave an introductory talk on EA for the Benckiser Stiftung, a German foundation that supports non-profit organizations in the country. It was an important step since we had the opportunity to contact several non-profits in Munich, some of which have shown interest in EA. (The Benckiser Stiftung itself recently started donating to GiveDirectly.) The 45 minute talk gathered around 30 people from various organizations and was followed by two hours of Q&A. We believe this will give EA a good deal of visibility in Munich.

Thanks Gleb_T for encouraging me to post to this thread!

With some very helpful advice from Gleb, at Animal Charity Evaluators we were able to get a letter to the editor published about a recent bill proposed in Oklahoma.

Hey, first time I was not the first one to post on this thread after publishing it! I guess it's a sign that the Accomplishments Open Thread project is gaining ground, so I'd count that as an accomplishment :-)

Another thing I've been really glad about this month was the EA-themed article I published in TIME in response to a breaking news story. That article in a major public venue not only resulted in shifting the Overton window a bit toward effective giving, but also resulted in some positive coverage of Effective Altruism in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, a venue not known at all for its friendliness to EA. Moreover, the piece in TIME got a whole bunch of people to visit the sites of EA meta-charities such as The Life You Can Save (42), GiveWell (24), and Animal Charity Evaluators (50), and effective charities such as GiveDirectly and Against Malaria Foundation (numbers coming soon).

Speaking of these numbers, this month Intentional Insights established collaborations with them and a couple of others to get numbers from them of people who visited their websites from articles we placed in broad media venues. This will be a good way for Intentional Insights to measure its impact, since our goal is to direct attention toward effective giving opportunities.

In addition to getting that article published as part movement-building work, I also did some capacity-building work by writing a guide for EA participants to use in channeling breaking news stories for the sake of the EA movement. We were later contacted by Animal Charity Evaluators to provide coaching for them in using this guide in getting their content published in newspapers. As part of that conversation and later exchanges, we agreed to help them with marketing and outreach questions and projects. Had a similar conversation with GiveWell about marketing and outreach, although not about publication in newspapers.

Making further progress on the Secular Giving Games project on which we are collaborating with The Life You Can Save and the Local Effective Altruist Network. The International Humanist Ethical Union expressed interest, which opens up the possibility of spreading Giving Games to secular organizations around the globe.

Also made some progress on the Marketing Resource Bank project with the Local Effective Altruist Network, which is meant to provide resources on marketing to EA participants and effective charity staff.

Separately from InIn stuff, I want to give a shout-out to Boris Yakubchik, who made this video back in 2011, long before InIn was around. I think it exemplifies the kind of thing that we as EA participants can do well – share about what motivates us to give in an engaging fashion. If you haven’t see it, check it out, and consider sharing it with others.