Hahaha. Another one of mine was "Institute for the Development of Effective Altruism" (IDEA - which came second to CEA... I'm glad it did!) As was "The High Impact NetworK" (THINK), which I was pleased to see got taken on.

Thanks for the comment, Carl. I've taken back those examples, which were mistakes. In general am going to have a higher bar for quality before putting up posts, as I've found it's been easier to mislead people than I was expecting. (Maybe I could introducing a new operator? E.g. [Thinking out loud]:[sentence]") I agree that recommending funding GOTV, even non-officially, would be a bad move for the movement, for the reasons you say. I was just trying to give an example of a donation opportunity that could conceivably have high expected value in the eyes of both the "charity begins at home" advocate and the globally-minded effective altruist.

I was basing the mindfulness recommendation on opinions with academics, including someone doing a meta-analysis on the intervention at the Oxford Centre for Evidence-based Medicine, who reported that it was effective in the short-term (but not in the long-term). The views I heard reported were "I was sceptical at first, because it seems so 'alternative', but the studies show it actually works.". But I hadn't actually looked into the data myself, which I should have done.

Thanks for the comment, Peter. I agree that we couldn't get broad popular agreement on which political party is the better one, but I'm pretty sure we could get about 50% agreement! In the UK at least, people who get into EA are usually either on the left or don't have political leanings (though with some notable exceptions, like Ben Hoskin). So I think that if you promoted funding GOTV for the Democrats/Labour, you'd only alienate something like 10% of potential EAs.

And we wouldn't need to put massive amounts of time into it. Even a first-pass guess at a charity that seems particularly good for both the home nation and the world would generate most of the benefits I list above. (I think that many people would also be much happier donating to foreign countries if it also benefited the home country).

Agree on GW labs, though I think that geoengineering research, open science, 80k, xrisk reduction, are even less likely to get taken seriously than political funding.

Also, I should have said I'm not suggesting this as "the most important thing to be doing right now" - just something I think would be worthwhile that I used to think wouldn't have been worthwhile.