I'm from NY. I'm feeling a weird desire to try to attend this. Which I won't, actually, because it's 5 hours away and I work Friday and it's just silly. But I'd like to get to meet more people who care significantly about optimal philanthropy and if you and Julia ever held a larger event on a weekend I'd consider going. I spent yesterday reading much of your blogs and found them particularly useful.
I'm glad you found our blogs useful!
There are a lot of great people in NYC (or are you in upstate NY?) who care about optimal philanthropy and used to come to our meetups when they lived in Boston: Mark Lee, Geoff Anders, Stephanie Wykstra. And GiveWell is based there. I'd be happy to introduce you to people if you'd like.
I'm actually pretty involved with the NY optimal philanthropy cluster - I'm working with Mark and Geoff on their current project. Haven't gotten in contact with the Givewell people yet, apart from Stephanie.
But despite a pretty strong Less Wrong presence in NY, there's surprisingly few people there who are genuinely passionate about optimal philanthropy. Looking to get to know the existing community better and hope it can grow.
If you know some time in advance when you'll be in Boston I'd be happy to try and schedule one of these meetups you could come to.
Julia and I have done a lot of thinking and writing about how to do the most good in the world [1] [2] but we don't have things all figured out. We'd love to talk to other people interested in optimal philanthropy, so if you're in the Boston area on Friday July 6th we'd love to have you over for dinner and discussion.
Details:
[1] Julia's blog: givinggladly.com