Making volunteering abroad useful
My first work in education and international development was a volunteering program overseas, carried out by a typically ineffective program. It wasted funds, was more tourism than productive work, and despite being replicated in dozens of countries had no capacity to learn from experiences and mistakes over time.
Daniela Papi offers a thorough take on the subject: the dangers of voluntourism.
Valuing the free and universal
Nathan Myrhvold points out the extraordinary value of Wikipedia, and how hard it is to assign value to something priceless, in this chat with Bill Gates. We should take care not to undervalue the results of our concerted work — it is much greater than a few hundred thousand hours of intelligent effort, or a few million pages of printed informational text (both of which are, for most jobs or publications, not universally available at negligible transaction cost).
New solution for the info-lustig
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