If you do ever want to make more money off this, putting just a couple high effort but also click baity posts behind a pay wall would probably have a big impact.
Given that I normally become a paid subscriber due to a lack of impulse control, I have to say the upgrade button saying "you can't subscribe on the app" really gives me altogether too much time to think about the decision.
I've been interested for a while in the inherent conflict between Substack's paywall and the purpose of writing. If you want people to adopt your ideas, charging them money to see those ideas is the worst thing you could possibly do.
No? You operationalize the ideas by spreading them. You're telling other people how things should be. They will then adjust things in that direction. That's the entire concept.
This is actually false. People naturally tend to value more those things they paid for. Free ideas are common, and quickly forgotten. Ideas you paid for take on a weight of importance. Of course, there is a level of price that eventually dissuades people--an author wants to aim for the Goldilock's zone between them.
I also hate paywall stunts like that, and yet I cannot deny they work. This is not the just world where what is most effective is also what is least annoying.
Why do you hate them? Isn’t it entirely reasonable to charge money for content people want to see? I find it irritating to not get stuff I want to free of course, but it’s not unfair
Why don't you mention all the great activities you fund via this blog like the ACX grants? Furthermore, I'm sure you donate some of your income to effective organizations.
Thanks for appreciating ACX Grants etc. I'm also proud of it. But I received some big crypto donations a long time ago, crypto went up, and I had good luck investing it. I set this aside as the seed money for ACX Grants and other charitable activities, it's (partly) walled off from my regular finances, and your subscriptions won't affect the pot size much one way or the other.
As far as I understand it's explicitly not necessary? And also, it might be kind to those who receive the money, but it certainly isn't kind to those who give their money away due to a lie.
I love your short fiction. I know you’re a father of twins, but I just found out about this new productivity hack called 1am. Has made a huge difference for me.
I think part of your problem is that you're too prolific of a writer. Personally my reason for not having subbed is that I'm on the free tier and I already can't get to all your writing. Subscribing would just pay for more articles I'd (unfortunately) miss
I like the yearly subscriber drive. I enjoyed reading it and spent some time thinking about whether subscribing was right given what I get out of your writing and what my financial situation is.
Scott, I think you underestimate how much value subscribers get out of exchanging ideas with each other, or just schmoozing. That's a kind of second-order achievement of yours: You write this special stuff, but you also host a great forum. ACX is the best place I've ever found for talking with people online. I think you could increase subscriptions by having some subscirber-only contests or debates -- something like the book review contest, but smaller scale. Like, say, a humorous poem contest. You name the topic and maximum word length , all entries due in a week, winners chosen by group. (And you'd surely want to enter that one anonymously yourself.) Or written debates between 2 members -- & after a certain number of exchanges between the 2 the rest of the group can join in. Or, I dunno, some kind of group brainstorming..
It works to go to manage my subscription, but the options are $10/month, $100/year, $250/founding member (is that still open?), and cancel. No $2.50/month option.
+1 to all the comments of the first 3 hours. It took me some months to pay-subscribe, but now I am happy to be self-locked-in forever. All for the warm glow, though I love the kids, too. Greetings to Razib Khan, will do another one-month-subscription of his stuff next year. ;)
Why would you want anyone paying for your newsletter who wasn’t reading it?
Payment provides validation.
It provides income if you have decided to make a living from your writing and leave medicine at some point in the future.
It also reflects a commitment from your readers that they want to read what you have to say because what you are saying is important enough for them to want to invest in you.
I believe you are misreading the tea leaves.
The fact is, you are an acquired taste.
Some of those who dropped out did not read your work long enough to develop an appreciation for it.
(I get put off every time I read about the relationship between high IQ and success)
What you should be focused on are the statistics showing that your ratio of leavers to keepers is leveling off at a time when competition is beginning to soar.
What you and your readers should give more thought to is how you can motivate your readership to convince others to read your substack. That is how t is always done. Word of mouth.
He was not an acquired taste for me. I read a coupla his essays and was delighted. I'd had no idea anyone was doing that kind of thinking out loud on the fucking internet. It is not the only kind of thinking and writing I admire, but it's one you just don't run across very often.
Just the fact that in Latin, the letter "V" was used for both the "u" vowel sound and the "v" consonant sound, essentially functioning as a single letter representing both sounds.
So it’s possible for dopey people like me with a public school education to get confused.
Establishing good sleep routines solved many problems that didn't seem like they were sleep related, until we later discovered it's much easier to work with a consistently well rested child.
Epistemic status: It really helped my wife and I with each of our children and multiple friends to whom we've recommended/gifted the book. Also, my sister highly praised it for helping with her triplets.
I would point out also, to those of you not paying, and you are mostly libertarians and utilitarians and thus anti socialist and anti free stuff, that since the majority of what Scott produces is free those of us who pay are subsidising those of you who don’t.
...Why would I pay for something that's being offered for free? Nobody is forcing him to provide free content. There's no imperative to subsidize a flawed business model.
What does that have to do with anything? This blog isn't a charity, it's a for-profit blog sponsored by a blog hosting startup. Generosity has nothing to do with this.
No, it's the personal website of an amateur content creator, who doesn't have to share this with us. His articles cause me to feel a sensation of gratitude, such that I would like to reciprocate in some way. I feel a closer human connection to Scott that I do to, say, the coffee shop I am writing this in. Sorry if you don't feel that way.
I am also interested in this. Scrolling through all posts in the archive to manually go through them is a little annoying; especially since you can't even ctrl-f 'paid' on the archives page or anything, as the status is represented by a little lock image instead. It's strange that substack doesn't let you just list all the paywalled/nonpaywalled posts. Or if it does, I haven't figured out how.
+1 to this, just paid and disappointed to find that there's not a way to filter for all the posts I haven't read (since I've read all the free ones as they've been published).
I subscribed and am having the same problem, just finished reading through all the linked posts in this and the last two subscribe drives but according to this there should be 18 more posts (from 2021?) that I've never read.
I hope you dont lose money due to students that were previously paying the full price beginning to pay the student price because of this. With that being said, I cannot find the student price
Decided to subscribe this year. Thanks for offering the discounted tier. Not many writers do, but your reach extends to young and/or less wealthy readers.
This isn't really for the locked content either, just to keep funding content in general. Musicians face a similar quandry: streaming is basically "free", so purchasing digital content can feel like a mere donation. It is in a way, but with the framing that "artists need support and we can't all be piggybackers", I find support can be more motivating.
I believe this is why crowdfunding schemes (e.g. kickstarter) can reach insane heights of investment even for non-tangibles like music. It allows creators to extort the public: "we'll create this thing (here's some show of proof that we can and will), but we need money upfront or you won't be able to get it at all, ever". The reality is similar when something is already available off-the-shelf, if no one buys it there won't be more, but there's less sense of urgency.
Or maybe it's all the "bonuses" that matter, idk. It doesn't always work. Plenty of bands have e.g. Patreon or other subscription schemes already, and few people bite.
Not as a quid pro quo, but regardless of whether you subscribe, if you give me a few sentence description of what they are, I can give you a few sentence description to what I think and a link to any existing longer response that I agree with.
My position is basically that transferring resources from a high-productivity culture to a low-productivity culture is a deadweight loss of value to the world. You attempted to justify it in "Altruism and Vitalism as Fellow Travelers" but I think your economic analysis is incorrect. It costs $4,000 to save a Kenyan. At the end of thirty years you can have either a) $4000 invested in the US stock market at the historical average nominal return of 10% ~= $70,000 or b) A Kenyan with 3 kids, all of whom will likely still need your charity. (You don't get to take credit for the kids either - those aren't "saved" lives.) If you have $70k then you can save 70/4 = 17 lives. Even if your terminal value is "number of lives saved" then charity doesn't maximize it. It gets closer if you adjust for inflation but it's not clear to me that that's the right thing to do (life-saving interventions might get cheaper in the future). It _certainly_ doesn't add $56k of value to the world as you argued. Charity, no matter how well-intentioned, is indistinguishable from central planning: that's why you end up with people using bed nets to fish. I believe EA needs to answer the same arguments that proponents of communism do. Unless you're correcting a specific market failure (public good, coordination problem, etc) then ignoring price signals is always bad.
In my view the only thing that makes the world better is technological innovation and that only happens in the first world. If you want to help Kenya don't buy them bed nets, donate to a research lab that will develop the technology to eradicate malaria in 20 years. Lives saved is a linear function of wealth but wealth is an exponential function of time. Charity always loses to compound growth.
You're making a couple of different points here. Responding to each individually:
- Many EAs do invest their money, let it compound, and give later (usually before they die, since it's very hard to bind your heirs to give to charity after your death). This is fine. There are some considerations for and against it. You can see a long list at https://ea.greaterwrong.com/topics/patient-altruism , or a simpler summary at https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/KELwfq5d3nvGyBii6/don-t-wait-the-case-for-giving-sooner-rather-than-later . This doesn't apply to x-risk or related causes, since things might be more urgent there. Also, of course, if you take this argument seriously you would *never* give to charity (or consume anything personally yourself!) because it's always more tempting to wait another year, then another, and so on.
- Many EAs do donate to research labs working on malaria eradication technology, and other related technologies; Open Philanthropy (the big EA funder) played a significant part in the development of both of the major malaria vaccines. To give another example, EA is probably the main funder of research into far UV machinery that might be able to eradicate all respiratory viruses. The reason you hear more about bednets is that the average person with $5000 to spend has no idea how to fund a research lab (or how to tell which research labs are legit), and bednets are a simple thing anyone can buy an unlimited amount of. EA billionaires have already funded all research labs that the movement is aware of which are doing good work on malaria eradication and similar issues. One big cause area is to find or incubate more such labs, but this is hard and, again, can't be done by a random person with $5000 to spend.
- "Charity, no matter how well-intentioned, is indistinguishable from central planning." This doesn't seem at all related to me. Are you saying that, because charity does specific things for people (eg give them bednets) rather than a general thing (give them money) it is claiming to know what they want better than they do? If that's your argument, you could easily donate to https://www.givedirectly.org/, an EA charity that just sends the money. However, every other EA charity has been found to be more effective than this (because this is the lower bar; nobody will fund something that's worse than it). How is this possible? One charity is giving iodine to pregnant women in Pakistan, because otherwise their fetuses will have iodine deficiency and -5 IQ points or something. These iodine pills cost something like $10 for the entire pregnancy. Do you believe that, if you just gave Pakistani women $10, they would use it in some higher-utility way? It's easy to say "central planning is impossible in every conceivable case, you're being paternalistic", but in practice there are just giant gains waiting to be picked up everywhere. Why? I don't know. Maybe the average Pakistani woman doesn't understand the science of iodine deficiency, or is suspicious of medicine but will take pills they get for free, or 5 IQ points are more useful to a general utilitarian trying to kick-start development than a mother, or iodine pills just aren't salient enough normally. Have you told all your relatives to take choline (a nutrient that even most First Worlders are deficient in, and which can probably boost IQ in pregnancy). Why not? Do you have children? Did you rationally decide that other things were a better use of $20 than getting choline during pregnancy?
I think you need to re-examine your business model. I definitely could afford a paid subscription, but the only thing on your list that I could possibly be interested in paying extra for is 'the warm glow of supporting the blog', and for me the warmth runs the other way. I get warm feelings for supporting niche writers who hardly have a following at all, and you're not one of them. You are already well-connected to the EA charity ecosystem, and can hand out money for contests and the like, and I figured that you managed to make a 'free to the world' promotional policy for ACX work because you were getting paid some other way. There are things you could do -- say charging for ACX meetups and taking a slice or whatever. Or selling ACX branded swag. Or going 'freemium'. Maybe some people -- not me -- would be happy to pay if you could give them a way to have a 'forum badge' to boast of their support to other ACX readers when posting in this blog? I suppose that would have to be worked out with substack, and isn't something you could do unilaterally. But 'pay me money to get a tiny fraction more of what I am already getting for free' generally fails in the marketplace. Should this place be any different?
I have a fairly well-read blog in Czech (not on Substack - I had plans to migrate, then abandoned them).
Zero paywalls, zero ads, but I ask my readers to buy my books under every post. Given that the e-shop is mine and I self-publish, it works quite reliably.
The problem with Substack is that there are way too many good authors now, but for an individual reader, a particular author only hits the sweet spot once in a time, or only covers topics interesting for you for, say, 20 per cent of the time.
Which is bad. Few of us can afford 50 subscriptions concurrently to only use them sometimes, and there is no possibility to pay for individual articles.
A site-wide Substack subscription, even a fairly expensive one (500+ dollars yearly?) would sell well.
I don't know how long Razib Khan has been monetizing his content, but it seems like he's an up-and-coming blog, while ACX has a longstanding, entrenched following. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with finding a plateau of dedicated followers.
My main piece of advice would be to have 1-2 more posts per month that are half paywalled; ie the intro or first half of the post is available. Maybe do that for the spicier culture war posts (like the NIQ piece from a few days ago).
You could also roll out tiered subscription options. You could lock the comments section and have an extremely cheap tier (~$1-2/mo) just to be able to comment, and the regular $10/mo tier for everything else (including the Hidden Open Threads). Iirc, you mentioned once that Cremieux told you that keeping the flimsiest of gates (~$1) screens out pretty much all the trolls in a comment section.
I say this all as someone who never considered subscribing until I got a subscription from the Book Review Contest. Now I really like it! I had no idea how much fun the hidden open threads can be. I plan to pay for it once my free year runs out.
Just get the $2.50 discount subscription and cancel it after you've read those.
If you do ever want to make more money off this, putting just a couple high effort but also click baity posts behind a pay wall would probably have a big impact.
I don't have enough impulse control! When I write high effort click baity posts, I want the whole world to see them and talk about them!
Given that I normally become a paid subscriber due to a lack of impulse control, I have to say the upgrade button saying "you can't subscribe on the app" really gives me altogether too much time to think about the decision.
This is unfortunately due to anticompetitive practices by Apple and Google.
I've been interested for a while in the inherent conflict between Substack's paywall and the purpose of writing. If you want people to adopt your ideas, charging them money to see those ideas is the worst thing you could possibly do.
Unless you are balancing the spread if the ideas with gathering the resources you need to operationalize the ideas.
No? You operationalize the ideas by spreading them. You're telling other people how things should be. They will then adjust things in that direction. That's the entire concept.
This is actually false. People naturally tend to value more those things they paid for. Free ideas are common, and quickly forgotten. Ideas you paid for take on a weight of importance. Of course, there is a level of price that eventually dissuades people--an author wants to aim for the Goldilock's zone between them.
You seem to have confused memetic spread with the sunk cost effect.
Perhaps you could provide an example of the dynamic you describe having worked in the past?
Especially when all you advertises don't need money. I'm new to this and not sure what to do.
Agree. Ask Aella how that works
This nearly worked on me one time, and I hated myself for it.
I think that depends - I for one *hate* paywall stunts like that, and it makes me vow *not* to subscribe to the organ using them.
But others may well be "I have to read the rest of this, take my money!" I suppose try it and see how it works out?
What's a bit awkward for Scott is that he is on record as also being morally opposed to such things:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/04/problems-with-paywalls/
Meh. Lady's got to make a living somehow, and the stuff was interesting.
I've passed the point of getting anything out of dating advice, but it probably did helps some guys.
I also hate paywall stunts like that, and yet I cannot deny they work. This is not the just world where what is most effective is also what is least annoying.
Why do you hate them? Isn’t it entirely reasonable to charge money for content people want to see? I find it irritating to not get stuff I want to free of course, but it’s not unfair
Why don't you mention all the great activities you fund via this blog like the ACX grants? Furthermore, I'm sure you donate some of your income to effective organizations.
Thanks for appreciating ACX Grants etc. I'm also proud of it. But I received some big crypto donations a long time ago, crypto went up, and I had good luck investing it. I set this aside as the seed money for ACX Grants and other charitable activities, it's (partly) walled off from my regular finances, and your subscriptions won't affect the pot size much one way or the other.
It doesn’t have to be true for you to mention it, as long as it is both necessary and kind.
I for one appreciate Scott not lying about this.
I second not lying for money unless truly necessary
For the record, this was a joke. Apologies if that wasn’t clear.
Thanks for clarifying, I didn't get it :D
As far as I understand it's explicitly not necessary? And also, it might be kind to those who receive the money, but it certainly isn't kind to those who give their money away due to a lie.
I love your short fiction. I know you’re a father of twins, but I just found out about this new productivity hack called 1am. Has made a huge difference for me.
I subscribe because I think that Scott being rich for his contributions is Right and Just and makes the world more orderly.
The labourer is worthy of his hire 😁
Yeah, why not? Makes sense to me.
I'll probably subscribe using the other account that never posts. ;)
Well said! This is why I subscribe. And some of the paywalled posts are more experimental and therefore more interesting.
$25 per year for dozens of new ACX posts???
This is feeling like the Louisiana Purchase
This got a chuckle out of me.
I'm a student now, but I won't be forever. Does the student subscription auto-renew?
I'm fine with you locking in the student rate now.
I'm a paid subscriber now.
Unfair! You weren't writing when I was a student! :-)
(I'm not going to try to guess if you were alive when I was a student.)
I think part of your problem is that you're too prolific of a writer. Personally my reason for not having subbed is that I'm on the free tier and I already can't get to all your writing. Subscribing would just pay for more articles I'd (unfortunately) miss
I'd appreciate some unbundling of the different subscriber benefits as there are several i do not value.
I like the yearly subscriber drive. I enjoyed reading it and spent some time thinking about whether subscribing was right given what I get out of your writing and what my financial situation is.
Scott, I think you underestimate how much value subscribers get out of exchanging ideas with each other, or just schmoozing. That's a kind of second-order achievement of yours: You write this special stuff, but you also host a great forum. ACX is the best place I've ever found for talking with people online. I think you could increase subscriptions by having some subscirber-only contests or debates -- something like the book review contest, but smaller scale. Like, say, a humorous poem contest. You name the topic and maximum word length , all entries due in a week, winners chosen by group. (And you'd surely want to enter that one anonymously yourself.) Or written debates between 2 members -- & after a certain number of exchanges between the 2 the rest of the group can join in. Or, I dunno, some kind of group brainstorming..
I would love to see a subscriber Pol.is poll on what we think about various articles.
Yes
Did you ever do an inflation adjustment?
I can't find the student/hardship subscription option.
Does the link in the last word of the post work for you?
It works to go to manage my subscription, but the options are $10/month, $100/year, $250/founding member (is that still open?), and cancel. No $2.50/month option.
Weird, when I click it I see all of those numbers crossed out and replaced with $2.50 or equivalent. Maybe it's a bug?
I just clicked on it and do see that, the monthly is $2.50 and annual is $25.00
I cancelled, but I'm still not seeing the student option offered.
I'm using the link at the end of your post.
Maybe I need to actually miss a month?
Maybe try logging in with an incognito browser window in case there is some cookie lying around with your old subscription data?
That was a reasonable idea, but I didn't get access to the $2.50/month rates. What's more, substack seems to have forgotten that I unsubscribed.
If you're already subscribed with a non-student option, try unsubscribing and then trying the link again.
+1 to all the comments of the first 3 hours. It took me some months to pay-subscribe, but now I am happy to be self-locked-in forever. All for the warm glow, though I love the kids, too. Greetings to Razib Khan, will do another one-month-subscription of his stuff next year. ;)
Scott, I don’t understand.
Why would you want anyone paying for your newsletter who wasn’t reading it?
Payment provides validation.
It provides income if you have decided to make a living from your writing and leave medicine at some point in the future.
It also reflects a commitment from your readers that they want to read what you have to say because what you are saying is important enough for them to want to invest in you.
I believe you are misreading the tea leaves.
The fact is, you are an acquired taste.
Some of those who dropped out did not read your work long enough to develop an appreciation for it.
(I get put off every time I read about the relationship between high IQ and success)
What you should be focused on are the statistics showing that your ratio of leavers to keepers is leveling off at a time when competition is beginning to soar.
What you and your readers should give more thought to is how you can motivate your readership to convince others to read your substack. That is how t is always done. Word of mouth.
He was not an acquired taste for me. I read a coupla his essays and was delighted. I'd had no idea anyone was doing that kind of thinking out loud on the fucking internet. It is not the only kind of thinking and writing I admire, but it's one you just don't run across very often.
Same.
Out of curiosity, any thoughts on adding features for founding member subscriptions?
Scott,
Why do you have a picture of Bernie Sanders with this post?
Rick
It's a meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-am-once-again-asking-for-your-financial-support
My Bernie Sanders impression makes our two cats hide under the bed. No way to do it without booming though.
Scott: "subscribe" was misspelled as "subscrive"
I can't imagine writing "Subscribe Drive '25" and missing the opportunity for a three-way rhyme.
lol
Side effect of all that thinking about Rome?
No, there is no V in any Latin root of the verb.
scribo, scribere, scripsi, scriptum
The Latin V is ill behaved for monolingual English speakers.
What do you mean?
Just the fact that in Latin, the letter "V" was used for both the "u" vowel sound and the "v" consonant sound, essentially functioning as a single letter representing both sounds.
So it’s possible for dopey people like me with a public school education to get confused.
Paid subscriber till I die. Or the Substack does. Whichever comes first.
For Scott and any other new parents, here's a book I highly recommend: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593158547
("new" = children < 5yo.)
Establishing good sleep routines solved many problems that didn't seem like they were sleep related, until we later discovered it's much easier to work with a consistently well rested child.
Epistemic status: It really helped my wife and I with each of our children and multiple friends to whom we've recommended/gifted the book. Also, my sister highly praised it for helping with her triplets.
OK. Thanks!
I would point out also, to those of you not paying, and you are mostly libertarians and utilitarians and thus anti socialist and anti free stuff, that since the majority of what Scott produces is free those of us who pay are subsidising those of you who don’t.
Take a moment to reflect on that.
...Why would I pay for something that's being offered for free? Nobody is forcing him to provide free content. There's no imperative to subsidize a flawed business model.
Except the desire to be generous with someone who has demonstrated generosity to us.
What does that have to do with anything? This blog isn't a charity, it's a for-profit blog sponsored by a blog hosting startup. Generosity has nothing to do with this.
No, it's the personal website of an amateur content creator, who doesn't have to share this with us. His articles cause me to feel a sensation of gratitude, such that I would like to reciprocate in some way. I feel a closer human connection to Scott that I do to, say, the coffee shop I am writing this in. Sorry if you don't feel that way.
You're both very silly.
Paid users - and I am one - receive a product the free users do not.
I think most of the worth of this sub is in free posts. And Scott likes comments on his posts so he keeps most of his stuff free, and free to comment.
Is there a list of all the paywalled posts? The previous sub drives list some but I'm not sure if that's all of them.
I am also interested in this. Scrolling through all posts in the archive to manually go through them is a little annoying; especially since you can't even ctrl-f 'paid' on the archives page or anything, as the status is represented by a little lock image instead. It's strange that substack doesn't let you just list all the paywalled/nonpaywalled posts. Or if it does, I haven't figured out how.
+1 to this, just paid and disappointed to find that there's not a way to filter for all the posts I haven't read (since I've read all the free ones as they've been published).
I subscribed and am having the same problem, just finished reading through all the linked posts in this and the last two subscribe drives but according to this there should be 18 more posts (from 2021?) that I've never read.
“You cannot manage your subscription from the app.”
The real test is to see if I feel the same conviction to subscribe when I get back to my laptop.
I hope you dont lose money due to students that were previously paying the full price beginning to pay the student price because of this. With that being said, I cannot find the student price
That NYT article REALLY worked.
Decided to subscribe this year. Thanks for offering the discounted tier. Not many writers do, but your reach extends to young and/or less wealthy readers.
This isn't really for the locked content either, just to keep funding content in general. Musicians face a similar quandry: streaming is basically "free", so purchasing digital content can feel like a mere donation. It is in a way, but with the framing that "artists need support and we can't all be piggybackers", I find support can be more motivating.
I believe this is why crowdfunding schemes (e.g. kickstarter) can reach insane heights of investment even for non-tangibles like music. It allows creators to extort the public: "we'll create this thing (here's some show of proof that we can and will), but we need money upfront or you won't be able to get it at all, ever". The reality is similar when something is already available off-the-shelf, if no one buys it there won't be more, but there's less sense of urgency.
Or maybe it's all the "bonuses" that matter, idk. It doesn't always work. Plenty of bands have e.g. Patreon or other subscription schemes already, and few people bite.
Eh, 2,000 bees? No big deal at this point in my life.
I actually successfully pulled the "read the backlog and unsubscribe" strategy with Aella's blog. It can be done!
I hear Kamala loves Venn diagrams. Maybe she will now have time to sign up.
I can endorse becoming a paid subscriber, it satisfies my preference of "giving Scott Alexander money."
(In all seriousness, I really appreciate Scott and his writing and I'm very happy to contribute.)
The student discount option isn't working for me.
Will you engage with my EA criticisms if I subscribe?
Not as a quid pro quo, but regardless of whether you subscribe, if you give me a few sentence description of what they are, I can give you a few sentence description to what I think and a link to any existing longer response that I agree with.
My position is basically that transferring resources from a high-productivity culture to a low-productivity culture is a deadweight loss of value to the world. You attempted to justify it in "Altruism and Vitalism as Fellow Travelers" but I think your economic analysis is incorrect. It costs $4,000 to save a Kenyan. At the end of thirty years you can have either a) $4000 invested in the US stock market at the historical average nominal return of 10% ~= $70,000 or b) A Kenyan with 3 kids, all of whom will likely still need your charity. (You don't get to take credit for the kids either - those aren't "saved" lives.) If you have $70k then you can save 70/4 = 17 lives. Even if your terminal value is "number of lives saved" then charity doesn't maximize it. It gets closer if you adjust for inflation but it's not clear to me that that's the right thing to do (life-saving interventions might get cheaper in the future). It _certainly_ doesn't add $56k of value to the world as you argued. Charity, no matter how well-intentioned, is indistinguishable from central planning: that's why you end up with people using bed nets to fish. I believe EA needs to answer the same arguments that proponents of communism do. Unless you're correcting a specific market failure (public good, coordination problem, etc) then ignoring price signals is always bad.
In my view the only thing that makes the world better is technological innovation and that only happens in the first world. If you want to help Kenya don't buy them bed nets, donate to a research lab that will develop the technology to eradicate malaria in 20 years. Lives saved is a linear function of wealth but wealth is an exponential function of time. Charity always loses to compound growth.
I expand on this a bit on the original post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/altruism-and-vitalism-as-fellow-travelers/comment/64627110?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=64627110&utm_source=substack
You're making a couple of different points here. Responding to each individually:
- Many EAs do invest their money, let it compound, and give later (usually before they die, since it's very hard to bind your heirs to give to charity after your death). This is fine. There are some considerations for and against it. You can see a long list at https://ea.greaterwrong.com/topics/patient-altruism , or a simpler summary at https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/KELwfq5d3nvGyBii6/don-t-wait-the-case-for-giving-sooner-rather-than-later . This doesn't apply to x-risk or related causes, since things might be more urgent there. Also, of course, if you take this argument seriously you would *never* give to charity (or consume anything personally yourself!) because it's always more tempting to wait another year, then another, and so on.
- Many EAs do donate to research labs working on malaria eradication technology, and other related technologies; Open Philanthropy (the big EA funder) played a significant part in the development of both of the major malaria vaccines. To give another example, EA is probably the main funder of research into far UV machinery that might be able to eradicate all respiratory viruses. The reason you hear more about bednets is that the average person with $5000 to spend has no idea how to fund a research lab (or how to tell which research labs are legit), and bednets are a simple thing anyone can buy an unlimited amount of. EA billionaires have already funded all research labs that the movement is aware of which are doing good work on malaria eradication and similar issues. One big cause area is to find or incubate more such labs, but this is hard and, again, can't be done by a random person with $5000 to spend.
- "Charity, no matter how well-intentioned, is indistinguishable from central planning." This doesn't seem at all related to me. Are you saying that, because charity does specific things for people (eg give them bednets) rather than a general thing (give them money) it is claiming to know what they want better than they do? If that's your argument, you could easily donate to https://www.givedirectly.org/, an EA charity that just sends the money. However, every other EA charity has been found to be more effective than this (because this is the lower bar; nobody will fund something that's worse than it). How is this possible? One charity is giving iodine to pregnant women in Pakistan, because otherwise their fetuses will have iodine deficiency and -5 IQ points or something. These iodine pills cost something like $10 for the entire pregnancy. Do you believe that, if you just gave Pakistani women $10, they would use it in some higher-utility way? It's easy to say "central planning is impossible in every conceivable case, you're being paternalistic", but in practice there are just giant gains waiting to be picked up everywhere. Why? I don't know. Maybe the average Pakistani woman doesn't understand the science of iodine deficiency, or is suspicious of medicine but will take pills they get for free, or 5 IQ points are more useful to a general utilitarian trying to kick-start development than a mother, or iodine pills just aren't salient enough normally. Have you told all your relatives to take choline (a nutrient that even most First Worlders are deficient in, and which can probably boost IQ in pregnancy). Why not? Do you have children? Did you rationally decide that other things were a better use of $20 than getting choline during pregnancy?
Uh oh, did I stump you?
I'm tempted to subscribe, read all the backlog, and cancel after a month.
I think you need to re-examine your business model. I definitely could afford a paid subscription, but the only thing on your list that I could possibly be interested in paying extra for is 'the warm glow of supporting the blog', and for me the warmth runs the other way. I get warm feelings for supporting niche writers who hardly have a following at all, and you're not one of them. You are already well-connected to the EA charity ecosystem, and can hand out money for contests and the like, and I figured that you managed to make a 'free to the world' promotional policy for ACX work because you were getting paid some other way. There are things you could do -- say charging for ACX meetups and taking a slice or whatever. Or selling ACX branded swag. Or going 'freemium'. Maybe some people -- not me -- would be happy to pay if you could give them a way to have a 'forum badge' to boast of their support to other ACX readers when posting in this blog? I suppose that would have to be worked out with substack, and isn't something you could do unilaterally. But 'pay me money to get a tiny fraction more of what I am already getting for free' generally fails in the marketplace. Should this place be any different?
I have a fairly well-read blog in Czech (not on Substack - I had plans to migrate, then abandoned them).
Zero paywalls, zero ads, but I ask my readers to buy my books under every post. Given that the e-shop is mine and I self-publish, it works quite reliably.
The problem with Substack is that there are way too many good authors now, but for an individual reader, a particular author only hits the sweet spot once in a time, or only covers topics interesting for you for, say, 20 per cent of the time.
Which is bad. Few of us can afford 50 subscriptions concurrently to only use them sometimes, and there is no possibility to pay for individual articles.
A site-wide Substack subscription, even a fairly expensive one (500+ dollars yearly?) would sell well.
I’ve spent far more than $10 on significantly less valuable analysis. Paid subscription inbound.
I don't know how long Razib Khan has been monetizing his content, but it seems like he's an up-and-coming blog, while ACX has a longstanding, entrenched following. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with finding a plateau of dedicated followers.
My main piece of advice would be to have 1-2 more posts per month that are half paywalled; ie the intro or first half of the post is available. Maybe do that for the spicier culture war posts (like the NIQ piece from a few days ago).
You could also roll out tiered subscription options. You could lock the comments section and have an extremely cheap tier (~$1-2/mo) just to be able to comment, and the regular $10/mo tier for everything else (including the Hidden Open Threads). Iirc, you mentioned once that Cremieux told you that keeping the flimsiest of gates (~$1) screens out pretty much all the trolls in a comment section.
I say this all as someone who never considered subscribing until I got a subscription from the Book Review Contest. Now I really like it! I had no idea how much fun the hidden open threads can be. I plan to pay for it once my free year runs out.
I'm going to subscribe for my deal with the Devil; is there a way to filter the archive by subscriber-only posts?
actually you're probably not reading comments on a post from a month ago; I'll ask in the Open Thread instead