twovests

twovests OP wrote

Walked 7 miles and did a bunch of exercise, fixed up problems on my blog, made an MVP CLI wrapper for a rust library, and worked on a big contribution to another Rust project docs, and scheduled several medical appointments, and most importantly: i posted about it

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twovests wrote

I think you're right, and the hostility you mention (wrt suspecting GoFundMe-s) is something (1) youth centric, and (2) weaponized effectively by people running scams.

I want to emphasize "youth centric"-- I think everyone I know (who is mostly 25+) feels the same wariness to Go Fund Me's and whatnot. I think we've all seen our share of scams.

And there's nothing wrong with the basic principle of "effective altruism"! It's the Effective Altruism movement of LessWrong types who'll throw out the vast troves of unquantifiable facts in favor of what they personally have the tools to measure and model. It makes them ignorant to their own insular culture, to the point where they are actually worried about, like, Roko's Basilisk.

But wanting to maximize the good that comes from your time/money/energy is still a good idea. I've donated exclusively to the two you mention (UNRWA and PCRF) for their long track record of making good use of their money, and not to any GoFundMe.

That said, I believe GoFundMe allows you to start a campaign in benefit of another beneficiary, e.g. this GoFundMe with the PCRF as a beneficiary. Who can say if the loss from GoFundMe's 3% cut balances out with a campaign potentially getting more people to donate

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twovests OP wrote

been thinking about this and the big problem is (1) i have to place trust in a local trump supporter who's great grandfather's middle name was honestly "wigglesworth" and (2) so does everyone else

that's fine if i'm interacting with a government and we're all pretending government works, but what if i want to notarize something to real people?

well, cryptotrash hasn't gotten usable for anyone to use it

and i think committing the document (or a hash of it) to a public github repo is good enough, for as long as github exists. any site with timestamps people trust

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