Tomorrow, I'll be moving to Hong Kong (for at least a few years). I'll be working for Jane Street, as I was in New York, doing roughly the same things, and still earning to give. Most of my worldly possessions are already on the slow boat to China, so there's no going back now...

I expect to be thrown back into learning-things mode for a while, but after that to have time to travel, to live in a new place, and spend some time off the well-trodden path. Expect either more blog posts, or fewer; I'm not yet sure which.

Meanwhile, feel free to send any travel recommendations my way, or let me know if you'll be in that part of the world anytime soon -- I honestly don't know when I'll be back in the New York/Boston area next!

I don't write about it much on this blog, because it it's slightly awkward to talk about, and I'm a small little mind that isn't used to fighting against hyperbolic discounting. But I remain committed to donating at least 10% of my income to the organizations that I think best make the universe a better place, and to talking about it on this blog. Here are my thoughts for 2017.

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These reflect a relatively small amount of thought, reading and discussion with people in the Effective Altruism community, and effectively no independent research. I don't expect that I'm particularly advantaged in evaluating charities, and so my opinion-forming strategy this year has mostly been to seek out the opinions of better-advantaged friends who I believe share my values, ask for their thoughts and reasons, and attempt to understand them.

However, I want to support a culture of sharing and building on each others' opinions, and to that end, I'm sharing my thoughts on my donations for this year, to create common knowledge about organizations that I believe deserve support and to share considerations to which I am sympathetic or find persuasive.

Disclosure: Some of the friends who have helped me form my opinions here work for, or are on the boards of, some of the charities I'm giving to.

I discuss tax considerations unique to 2017 (1a) and logistics for donating (1b), my general approach to identifying charities (2), the specific charities I'm supporting this year (3a, summary), and further reading in the form of evaluators' reports and personal writeups (4).

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To many people, the 2017 tax environment gives larger incentives to donate than will 2018's. For some people,

It's outside my typical poetic gamut, but as tradition dictates, and with apologies to Dr. Seuss...

She's got courage and brains
and a heart of great size,
and she's witty and clever
and patient and wise.
No fictional hero (though no challenge melts her),
she's our one and only Margo Ilene Seltzer!

She's taught 61, 161, and its 2---
she's taught so many courses, and flipped quite a few, too!
She's taught 50 and 51 -- really, it's true!
But really the one thing that matters a lot
is the incredible love for students she's got,
for it's no good at all to take a genius rare
and put them in a class for which they don't care.
But that's not our Margo!
No, our Margo gives
cooler lessons than any professor that lives.
And though it's said lecturers pump into sieves,
it's the flippers that give teaching new perspectives!

Though her thesis was on file systems to start,
she's a wizard with databases as an art:
Databases for graphs!

Or for provenance (PASS)!
To say nothing of BerkeleyDB in her past---
or of using ASC to make computers go fast!

And still that's not all; she's got a few tricks more
She's got plenty of talents and hobbies in store:
She's advisor to WiCS (and was prez' USENIX)
and her soccer team benefits from her strong kicks;
she's a masterful baker -- with no gluten at all;
she's a black belt, a poet; yes, she's got it all!

Oh Ms. Seltzer Margo!
Oh the places she'll go!
And though her Harvard colleagues may all cry "oh no",
there's a world to show
just how

A month and a half ago, I took a plane to Reno, a bus out into the desert, and spent a week at Burning Man. This is an attempt to order some of my thoughts about that week.

(1a)

Surviving (even in relative comfort) wasn't as hard my pre-trip reading billed it as. Of course, it helped that I was camping with engineers who could reliably make a plan, ask themselves what would cause it to go wrong, fix that, repeat -- and then problem-solve when something unanticipated broke. Basic competence, responsibility, and leadership -- together with a well-adhered-to norm of "make sure you have everything you personally need, even things the camp has plans to provide" ('radical self-reliance' is the usual term) -- left us with a lot of slack.

From there, it was mostly just a matter of drinking enough water / electrolytes, noticing when I needed to eat, remembering sunscreen and moisturizer and lip balm, wiping my hands and face and feet for dust, and using earplugs, a face mask, and melatonin to get enough sleep. Easy.

(And I hadn't even been camping since I was a kid.)

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And, together, we built some awesome things:

...which took, at one point, a lift team of ~forty volunteers to lift the top section of the sphere onto the base:

And now, for a philosophical digression. (Shocked! Shocked to find that philosophical digressions are happening here!)

(2a)

Zvi Mowshowitz argues that the modern world is out to get you and eat your entire life and that we should literally bring back the Sabbath:

We need restrictions that free us from the world. We need a new four freedoms

Here are some Harvard Crimson headlines from this week:

• [Sean] Spicer, [Chelsea] Manning to Join [Institute of Politics] as Visiting Fellows
• CIA Director Cancels IOP Appearance After Manning Appointment
• After Backlash, Kennedy School Withdraws Manning's Fellowship

So here we go...

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One of the more annoying things about this affair has been the way the discussion has chased a dramatized, misleading version of the facts. To borrow a phrase, the commentators (in my social bubble) seem content with -- if not actively interested in -- framing the matter to produce heat, instead of light.

The easiest antidote for this is actually to read Dean Elmendorf's statement announcing and explaining the withdrawal of the IOP's Visiting Fellow appointment. I say this not because I agree with the decision or Elmendorf's justification, but because it at least explains what the decision was:

Some visitors to the Kennedy School are invited for just a few hours to give a talk in the School’s Forum or in one of our lecture halls or seminar rooms; other visitors stay for a full day, a few days, a semester, or longer. Among the visitors who stay more than a few hours, some are designated as “Visiting Fellows,” “Resident Fellows,” “Nonresident Fellows,” and the like. At any point in time, the Kennedy School has hundreds of Fellows playing many different roles at the School. In general across the School, we do not view the title of “Fellow” as conveying a special honor; rather, it is a way to describe some people who spend more than a few hours at the School.

We invited Chelsea Manning to spend a day at the Kennedy School. Specifically, we invited

Two things.

First, these selected quotations from the voir dire of Martin Shkreli's trial for securities fraud are widely understood to be hilarious:

The Court: The purpose of jury selection is to ensure fairness and impartiality in this case. If you think that you could not be fair and impartial, it is your duty to tell me. All right. Juror Number 1.

Juror no. 1: I’m aware of the defendant and I hate him.

[Defense attorney] Benjamin Brafman: I’m sorry.

Juror no. 1: I think he’s a greedy little man.

...

The Court: Juror Number 1 is excused. Juror Number 18.

Juror no. 18: Both of my parents are on prescriptions that have gone up over the past few months, so much that they can’t afford their drugs. I have several friends who have H.I.V. or AIDS who, again, can’t afford the prescription drugs that they were able to afford.

The Court: These charges don’t concern drug pricing. Could you decide this case based only on the evidence —

Juror no. 18: No. No.

The Court: — presented at this trial and put aside anything you might have heard in the media?

Juror no. 18: No. No.

The Court: Sir, we are going to excuse you from this panel. Juror Number 25, come forward, please.

Juror no. 25: This is the price-gouging, right, of drugs?

The Court: This case has nothing to do with drugs.

Juror no. 25: My kids use those drugs.

The Court: As I said, the case does not concern anything that you might have read or heard about the pricing of certain pharmaceuticals.

Juror no. 25: It affects my opinion of

Still, this report shows that Harvard could learn a lot from MIT about how to run a university.

—Harry Lewis, "The Report Harvard Should Have Asked For", 2013

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Around the time I came to Harvard, both Mass Ave schools were dealing with the fallout of embarrassing, messy institutional mistakes. Both started with relatively small incidents, compounded by administrative decisions that were incredibly contentious during and after the fact.

Harvard's began with the Gov 1310 cheating scandal -- and it escalated when scandal erupted over the administration's search of faculty emails to find which sub-dean had spoken to the press, raising both privacy concerns and unease about the relationship between the faculty and the administration.

MIT's began with the arrest of Aaron Swartz for downloading academic articles from JSTOR -- and escalated over the Institute's complicity with the US Attorney's Office, which many members of the community felt betrayed the school's values.

That fall and spring, I was a freshman overburdened with courses that I could just barely keep up with. I was just barely finding my way around Harvard (and had not yet begun this blog!). But I wanted to understand the community I had joined, so I read commentary on what seemed to be the pressing issues, by people that I had come to respect. Some drew parallels between the questions of identity that faced each school. And I began to piece together a theory -- or at least an understanding -- about the soul of the modern university, at least as it was understood along Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Mass.

Now, I'm a degree-holder on the University's donor rolls, flung some two-hundred miles from Cambridge.