Sam Harris takes Giving What We Can pledge for himself and for his meditation company “Waking Up”
Harris references MacAksill and Ord as having been central to his thinking and talks about Effective Altruism and exstential risk. He publicly pledges 10% of his own income and 10% of the profit from Waking Up. He also will create a series of lessons on his meditation and education app around altruism and effectiveness.
Harris has 1.4M twitter followers and is a famed Humanist and New Athiest. The Waking Up app has over 500k downloads on android, so I guess over 1 million overall.
Harris is a marmite figure—in my experience people love him or hate him.
It is good that he has done this.
Newswise, it seems to me it is more likely to impact the behavior of his listeners, who are likely to be well-disposed to him. This is a significant but currently low-profile announcement. As will the courses be on his app.
I don’t think I’d go spreading this around more generally, many don’t like Harris and for those who don’t like him, it could be easy to see EA as more of the same (callous superior progessivism).
In the low probability (5%?) event that EA gains traction in that space of the web (generally called the Intellectual Dark Web—don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules) I would urge caution for EA speakers who might pulled into polarising discussion which would leave some groups feeling EA ideas are “not for them”.
This seems quite likely given EA Survey data where, amongst people who indicated they first heard of EA from a Podcast and indicated which podcast, Sam Harris’ strongly dominated all other podcasts.
More speculatively, we might try to compare these numbers to people hearing about EA from other categories. For example, by any measure, the number of people in the EA Survey who first heard about EA from Sam Harris’ podcast specifically is several times the number who heard about EA from Vox’s Future Perfect. As a lower bound, 4x more people specifically mentioned Sam Harris in their comment than selected Future Perfect, but this is probably dramatically undercounting Harris, since not everyone who selected Podcast wrote a comment that could be identified with a specific podcast. Unfortunately, I don’t know the relative audience size of Future Perfect posts vs Sam Harris’ EA podcasts specifically, but that could be used to give a rough sense of how well the different audiences respond.
Notably, Harris has interviewed several figures associated with EA; Ferriss only did MacAskill, while Harris has had MacAskill, Ord, Yudkowsky, and perhaps others.
This is true, although for whatever reason the responses to the podcast question seemed very heavily dominated by references to MacAskill.
This is the graph from our original post, showing every commonly mentioned category, not just the host (categories are not mutually exclusive). I’m not sure what explains why MacAskill really heavily dominated the Podcast category, while Singer heavily dominated the TED Talk category.
Sam Harris takes Giving What We Can pledge for himself and for his meditation company “Waking Up”
Harris references MacAksill and Ord as having been central to his thinking and talks about Effective Altruism and exstential risk. He publicly pledges 10% of his own income and 10% of the profit from Waking Up. He also will create a series of lessons on his meditation and education app around altruism and effectiveness.
Harris has 1.4M twitter followers and is a famed Humanist and New Athiest. The Waking Up app has over 500k downloads on android, so I guess over 1 million overall.
https://dynamic.wakingup.com/course/D8D148
I like letting personal thoughts be up or downvoted, so I’ve put them in the comments.
Harris is a marmite figure—in my experience people love him or hate him.
It is good that he has done this.
Newswise, it seems to me it is more likely to impact the behavior of his listeners, who are likely to be well-disposed to him. This is a significant but currently low-profile announcement. As will the courses be on his app.
I don’t think I’d go spreading this around more generally, many don’t like Harris and for those who don’t like him, it could be easy to see EA as more of the same (callous superior progessivism).
In the low probability (5%?) event that EA gains traction in that space of the web (generally called the Intellectual Dark Web—don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules) I would urge caution for EA speakers who might pulled into polarising discussion which would leave some groups feeling EA ideas are “not for them”.
My guess is people who like Sam Harris are disproportionately likely to be potentially interested in EA.
This seems quite likely given EA Survey data where, amongst people who indicated they first heard of EA from a Podcast and indicated which podcast, Sam Harris’ strongly dominated all other podcasts.
More speculatively, we might try to compare these numbers to people hearing about EA from other categories. For example, by any measure, the number of people in the EA Survey who first heard about EA from Sam Harris’ podcast specifically is several times the number who heard about EA from Vox’s Future Perfect. As a lower bound, 4x more people specifically mentioned Sam Harris in their comment than selected Future Perfect, but this is probably dramatically undercounting Harris, since not everyone who selected Podcast wrote a comment that could be identified with a specific podcast. Unfortunately, I don’t know the relative audience size of Future Perfect posts vs Sam Harris’ EA podcasts specifically, but that could be used to give a rough sense of how well the different audiences respond.
Notably, Harris has interviewed several figures associated with EA; Ferriss only did MacAskill, while Harris has had MacAskill, Ord, Yudkowsky, and perhaps others.
This is true, although for whatever reason the responses to the podcast question seemed very heavily dominated by references to MacAskill.
This is the graph from our original post, showing every commonly mentioned category, not just the host (categories are not mutually exclusive). I’m not sure what explains why MacAskill really heavily dominated the Podcast category, while Singer heavily dominated the TED Talk category.
The address (in the link) is humbling and shows someone making a positive change for good reasons. He is clear and coherent.
Good on him.