Let’s do this: what changed

What changed, 6 November 2026

2026-11-06T12:00:00Z

The note form at the bottom of every page is switched on: a note reaches the weekly review, which re-reads the source and lists the outcome on Contested.
The home page opens with the five problems on one path: learn, do, practice, with the Do step marked in each row.
The site has its own address: letsdothis.help.
Easier to read and to print: muted text now meets the accessibility contrast standard in both light and dark mode, keyboard focus is visible everywhere, and a printed Do page drops the buttons and shows each link's web address, so it works as a paper checklist for someone who isn't online.
Each Do page now opens with its steps and what they cost, and a one-line pointer under the headline takes someone who needs help right now straight to it: food today, a scam in progress, an eviction, the trafficking hotline, 988. The help boxes now carry a line in Spanish.
New: five charts, one per topic, each showing a comparison the page already makes: where scam money goes, what a child's life costs by whose estimate, the fall in visas for survivors, child poverty with and without the expanded tax credit, and how fast checking a source can be taught. Every value is printed as text beside its bar.
New: follow What changed in any feed reader, with no sign-up. Links to the site now show a card with the page's headline.
Every action label now follows one rubric, written down on About. A second grader who saw only each step's text agreed with 7 of 14 labels, so every label was checked again against the full evidence. Six were too generous and now say what the evidence is: recovery services for trafficking survivors and the Fair Food Program are weak, on small studies and their own figures; the cybercrime page's three steps are weak or untested; volunteering at a free tax site is weak, on official counts with no trial.
Every Do page now has "What happens after": what happens when you report a scam, call your bank, freeze your credit, give to GiveDirectly, write a legislator, volunteer at a tax site, ask for a lawyer in New York City housing court, turn off model training, or call 988. Every line was read from its source today.
The child-hunger headline is now "Treat a starving child. About $100." "Bring back" could read as back from death.
The evidence behind every page is public at Records: each claim, its source, the quote and what we found, and the evidence reviews that chose the actions.
New: pick the day and time you'll do step one, and it goes into your calendar. The monthly reminder on Practice pages now starts when you choose. Planning both a day and a time is what raised follow-through in the trial we read.
New: the hub opens with five things you can do in five minutes or less. Steps that only work in the United States now say so. When you tick every item on a page, it says so.
Trafficking: a sentence on the record of harm from police raids on the sex trade is back, on Human Rights Watch, GAATW and a peer-reviewed study. Child hunger: Taimaka's tax filings flag one related-party deal, a $100 loan from its president, and its board has two independent members of four.
Cybercrime: T-Mobile's lock path was wrong and is fixed. A bank wire isn't covered by the rule that caps your loss; ask your bank for a recall the same day. The drills now say to run them again within months, because the training fades.
Every line added to the pages after the 5 November check was read from its source on 6 November: 690 claims across the five topics. About 265 were corrected, reworded or relabelled. Three citations pointed to the wrong paper (the OptiMA malnutrition trial, the Lancet commission on orphanages, and the survivor-mentoring study); one fused two different preprints on AI and learning into one; several named studies had the wrong title, authors or finding. Each topic's table is in the site's records.
Child hunger: GiveWell's Top Charities Fund passes on all of a gift except payment fees. The 26% relapse figure came from a separate group of 420 children, not the 27,500 treated. Buying food near a crisis costs about a third less in Africa and Asia, by government auditors' count, not half. The largest vitamin A trial found no clear effect, rather than none. The SNAP sign-up trial was with older adults.
Trafficking: federal grants for survivors' services lapsed in October 2025, not in 2026. The Fair Food Program's 3,919 complaints span 2011 to 2024. The hotline's operator holds a federal grant, not a contract, and the hotline also takes tips. Airline staff mistook mixed-race families for traffickers at least three times, not four. The research the page cites on audits was part-funded by the Freedom Fund, which the page recommends; that is now disclosed. A sentence on raid-and-rescue harms came off until its sources are read.
Cybercrime: new-account fraud is about 7% of identity theft, not 3%. In a scam survey cited for older relatives, the 51% who avoided a loss had a bank, wire service or other company step in, not a relative. TransUnion's breach was in July 2025. Voluntary training after a failed phishing test didn't help, and clicks were higher with it.
Inequality: child poverty is now given on the Census Bureau's revised count: 5.1% in 2021, 12.0% in 2022, 13.4% in 2025. Full legal representation reached 44% of New York City tenants in court from April to June 2025. The IRS gives two participation estimates for the tax credit, 78% and 81%; the pages give both. Each step now says whether it touches poverty or inequality.
AI: the four reviews of whether ChatGPT helps students learn are now told apart: one was retracted in April 2026, and two preprints that adjust for publication bias shrink or erase the gain. A tutor that made students work "did no harm" in the Turkish trial; it didn't help. Detectors flagged 61% of non-native writers' essays, on average across seven tools. Phone bans raised scores in England only where they were kept.
Ticks are saved by each item's words, so an item reworded today shows unticked. Tick it again if you'd done it.
New: a line at the top of every Do page for the person living the problem: food tonight (211, SNAP), a scam in progress, an eviction notice, a crisis (988), and the trafficking hotline. Each page also says which of its hotlines and finders work in other languages.
New: child hunger's "What happens after": where the money goes, what a treated child goes through, how to stop a monthly gift, and what to expect after a call.
New: enter your ZIP code once and every Do page adds the steps for your state: where to apply for SNAP, whether your state runs Summer EBT, its own tax credit, its minimum wage, where tenants have a right to a lawyer, its attorney general's scam page, its school phone and chatbot laws, and your legislators. The ZIP stays in your browser.
New: tell us what's wrong. Every page has a form at the bottom; select words on the page and "Contest these words" copies them in. No name and no account; an email only if you want a reply. Every contested fact and what the review found is listed on Contested.
New: a monthly reminder for your calendar on every Practice page, buttons that save the trafficking and elder-fraud hotlines to your contacts, Share, Email and Text for the thirty-second versions, and a Print button. All made on your device; nothing is sent.
New: a dated ask, like the 11 December call, now greys out on your own screen once its date passes, with a note, until the page is re-checked.
Child hunger: the line "$5 is the minimum at GiveWell; $20 a month treats about two children a year" mixed two organisations' prices; GiveWell's minimum is $5 a month, and the two-children price is Taimaka's, which takes one-time gifts. The cost per death prevented is now given by GiveWell's figures for each program ($4,200 to $5,500; Taimaka's own estimate, $1,500 to $4,500, is shown separately), with the working: about 40 treatments at Taimaka's price and about 25 at the IRC's. "$20 a month is about 4% of a death prevented" became "4% to 7% of one life saved, whichever step you choose". "Roughly one every 14 seconds" came out of the Do page's opening.
Hub: the Do times now match the steps (trafficking 25 minutes, from $0; inequality 5 minutes to a shift a week), and the 2.2 million has its source.
About: it now says only what has happened: every figure was read in full on 5 or 6 November 2026, and a weekly review, first due 9 November, is scheduled to re-read one topic at a time.

What changed, 5 November 2026

2026-11-05T12:00:00Z

Every figure on the site was re-read from its original source today: about 590 claims across the five topics, of which 475 were confirmed, 58 corrected, 22 found not to be in the source they were credited to, 12 replaced by newer data, and 18 could not be fetched and are labelled. The corrections are listed below by topic.
Every action now carries a label for how strong the evidence is that it works (strong, moderate, weak, none but plausible, contradicted), after a review of the evidence behind each one. Several pages re-ordered their steps as a result.
Child hunger: GiveWell's top charities come first, with GiveWell's own March 2026 corrections and the one large trial that found no effect from vitamin A shown beside the pooled trials. Action Against Hunger came off the giving list (the gift is unrestricted, the page reports no outcomes, and its "90 cents of every dollar" doesn't match its audited accounts). UNICEF USA's $47 carton is an unrestricted gift. The call script now asks for flexible emergency food aid, not the shipping rule. New: help one US family enrol in SNAP or WIC (the best-tested domestic action) and the Summer EBT ask; food banks want money, not cans. The UN's direct estimate of deaths from severe malnutrition is "more than 100,000", which it calls a likely underestimate. The Secretary of State's "no one has died" was to Congress in May 2025; an August Reuters article had been credited by mistake.
Trafficking: funding survivors' recovery comes first, because federal victim-service grants ended on 1 October 2025 and T-visa approvals fell from 3,786 to 1,398. The hotline is now presented as a service for the person, not a tip line: 3,643 of its 13,623 situations last year went to police, and the federal evaluation found it has no influence on police action. The signs were rewritten as "what a bad job looks like", labour signs first, with language, race and living arrangements removed as cues. The Exodus Road and International Justice Mission came off the giving list. "Buy Fair Food tomatoes" became "ask your grocer to join". The operator change began in September 2025 and was announced complete on 8 December. The Freedom Fund takes one-time gifts only.
Cybercrime: the call-back rule is now step two, because it covers where the money actually goes. New section: one older relative, as a mutual rule, with the Justice Department's elder-fraud hotline. Refund rules spelled out: $50 cap if you report an unauthorised transfer within two business days; a payment you were tricked into sending is outside that rule. The FBI's recovery team froze $679 million across about 3,900 cases, out of a million complaints. A credit freeze stops new-account fraud, about 3% of identity theft; TransUnion itself was breached in August 2025. Three menu paths corrected (Google's Password Checkup and 2-Step Verification, Verizon). Windows 10's free updates need settings synced to a Microsoft account, or cost $30. Over-60s' losses were mostly investment and tech-support scams; voice-clone calls took over $5 million. "$945 billion" became "approaching $1 trillion", in the survey's own words.
Inequality: cash to people in extreme poverty comes first, one named bill to a state legislator second, free tax prep third with the honest claim: a refund filed free and right, a $346 fee kept, an average credit of $2,894; six trials found that pointing people to free sites barely changes who claims. New: tenant legal representation, the best-tested housing lever. Paying a household worker legally is a box of its own; New York's minimum wage stays at $17 and $16 on 1 January 2027, and a rise to $17.60 from 1 March needs the Legislature. Western Queens CLT is demoted (new, no completed project); credit unions and co-ops moved to the questions; reporting antitrust conduct was dropped. The head-count years are now given (62 in 2016, 8 in 2017, 42 in 2018, 26 in 2019, 12 in 2026). GiveDirectly's button is "Donate"; its summaries overstate its trials; it disclosed a 2022 fraud. US child poverty was 13.4% in 2024. Alaska's Legislature sets the dividend and hasn't followed the formula since 2016.
AI: "find the original before you share" and "a break from the feed" replaced "turn off training" in the three steps; the training switches stay, labelled as a privacy choice with no measured outcome. New: never run someone's writing through an AI detector (61% of non-native writers' essays were flagged); phone-free school days and the parent pledge, with their evidence; one named state bill, with the field-experiment evidence. The Turkey classroom study's students "didn't notice they'd learned less"; the critique of the brain-scan preprint is itself unreviewed; two 2026 meta-analyses of AI tutoring disagree and a 2025 one was retracted. Instagram's "Following" path corrected; Gemini checks for Google's SynthID watermark; Meta AI chats feed ads since 16 December 2025 with no opt-out; the pediatricians give one warning sign, not three; the weapons talks meet in Geneva in late November; the EU marking deadline for existing systems is 2 December 2026; Common Sense Media's institute discloses industry funding.
Every Practice page gained a "With others" section: the group formats with evidence, and the ones to avoid.
The essays moved from the route bar to "Where this started"; the About page now describes how the site is built and reviewed.
The site now reviews itself every week, one topic in full, and publishes its changes here.
Site restructured: each problem now has an overview and three routes, Learn, Do and Practice, plus the essay. The former guide pages became the Do pages.
Ticks on any checklist are now saved in your own browser so you can come back to them. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Child hunger: the essay's "every ten seconds / three million a year" is 2011 data; the pages use about 2.2 million a year, one every 14 seconds (UN IGME 2024 total × the 2013 Lancet share).
Inequality: the essay's "five people own as much as the bottom half" has no source; the pages use Oxfam's January 2026 count of twelve and note it moves with stock prices.
Trafficking: "two-thirds recruited online" and "nearly 40% of arrests were women" are one charity's own 2025 cases; the pages use UNODC's global figures (women 28% of convicted traffickers) and say no global online-recruitment figure exists.
Cybercrime: "trillions a year" is a 2020 industry projection; the pages use the FBI's reported $20.9 billion for 2025.
First version of the site built from the five essays.