The EA Holiday Calendar
By Aaron Gertler 🔸 @ 2019-07-30T09:03 (+27)
Update (3/15/20): I haven't heard much interest about this project in general, and I don't think my list of events is being used by many (if any) groups. Therefore, I'm not planning to update the calendar going forward, though I'll leave the current version available.
A year ago, I created an early version of an "EA Calendar" -- a Google Calendar featuring events that are relevant to the wider EA community.
My goal is for the calendar to cover events and holidays that a wide range of EA groups could celebrate (like Petrov Day).
There may be other things that such a calendar should include, like conferences or tax deadlines, but before I do the work of handling all that, I wanted to gauge whether people think such a resource would even be valuable, whether it would be better to maintain elsewhere, and so on.
If you know of an event which you think would fit, and want me to add it to the calendar, please add a comment to this post or send me an email.
If you'd like to add the EA Calendar to your own GCal, here's the link.
If you don't use GCal, you can still use the "agenda" mode at that link to see upcoming events. (There are also lots of online tools for syncing GCal and other calendars.)
Finally, if you have any other suggestions to improve the calendar's usefulness, I'd love to hear them!
Events currently marked on the calendar (as of 30 July 2019):
Note: Holidays that change their dates annually may not have been updated recently; I'll get to them before the next holiday on the calendar rolls around.
- Petrov Day
- Smallpox Eradication Day
- World Contraception Day
- World Health Day
- World Malaria Day
- World Immunization Week
- World Longevity Day
- World Vegetarian Day
- World Vegan Day
- Giving Tuesday
- Derek Parfit's birthday
- Norman Borlaug's birthday
- John Snow's birthday
Days I'm considering:
- Birthdays of living people (e.g. Peter Singer), though that seems much odder than celebrating the birthday of a non-living person
- Holocaust Remembrance Day (not so much because it's about a horrible event as because it's the closest thing I could find to a holiday honoring the Righteous Among the Nations)
Larks @ 2019-07-30T10:44 (+14)
This is a cool idea.
Perhaps William Wilberforce's birthday? The abolition of slavery is probably one of the biggest improvements in world history, and has many parallels for contemporary EA issues.
I would consider replacing Contraception Day (which might be good but is not a canonical EA cause, and is at least prima face in conflict with the Total View) with an explicitly somber day (similar to Yom Kippur), like Holocaust Memorial Day, or the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Possibly some space-related day could be a nice optimistic note, like the first man in space, or the moon landing.
You could also have the founding of GWWC.
aarongertler @ 2019-07-31T22:32 (+4)
Thanks for these suggestions! The founding of GWWC might work well, as the "birthday" of a living organization rather than a living person.
jgil @ 2019-07-31T03:21 (+4)
Winter solstice / summer solstice? Popular secular holiday in EA circles (though not strictly EA per se)
Nathan Young @ 2021-08-14T13:28 (+2)
What ideas do you think ought to be park of regular cycles of EA thought. Then how can we find holidays to fit to them.
Aaron Gertler @ 2021-08-15T04:06 (+4)
I don't think anyone really uses this calendar, and I haven't updated it in a long time (see the update at the beginning of the post).
If you have ideas about this, you may want to try making + proposing your own calendar to see if you can get users.