Based on the title of this I felt initially skeptical, but after reading the full article I updated towards this being an interesting thing to try.
A few thoughts/concerns:
I seem to be unusual in that I don’t find email management particularly difficult. I unsubscribe from all marketing emails immediately, and have a strict inbox zero policy which means any emails that require an action or time-consuming response are moved to my task manager, where they can be easily prioritized. I think it’s rare that I accidentally miss an email I would have otherwise responded to; if I don’t respond it’s usually because I actively deprioritized it. The prioritization process itself doesn’t feel too taxing for me.
Thinking about the kind of emails I get, and which ones I think are worth responding to vs which ones I predict would choose to pay for a response, I find it hard to imagine that these overlap, so I’m not sure if it would be a helpful signal. I’d change my mind on this if I tried it and it turned out they did generally overlap.
If imagine myself wanting to send a busy person an email and considering using a paid email, I immediately worry about making them feel obliged to respond even if they don’t want to, or tempting them to respond even if it isn’t a good use of their time, etc. Because of this, I’m not sure it solves the social capital issue of using words like ‘urgent’ or ‘important’.
I also share Khorton’s concern about it looking weird to people outside of EA and having reputational effects.
I wonder whether educating and encouraging good email hygiene could be an easier solution (at least initially). Some email hygiene tips:
Think really hard about what you want to achieve by emailing someone. Can you achieve it another way and preserve their attention? If not, make it as easy as possible for the recipient to give you what you need.
Ask specific questions rather than open-ended questions.
Be polite and friendly, but get to the point. It’s usually ok to skip ‘Hope this finds you well! How was your weekend?’ etc.
Provide any necessary context as clearly and succinctly as possible (including introducing yourself or reminding them who you are or what the project is and why you are asking them specifically—remember it won’t be as fresh in their mind as it is in yours!)
Attach or link to any necessary files, documents, or resources.
Use bold text to draw the eye to important parts (e.g. due dates or actions).
If it’s a short message to broadcast some info, put it in the subject followed by ‘EOM’ (end of message) so people know they don’t need to open the email (also consider ‘NNTR’ (no need to reply)).
If asking someone to review a document, tell them which sections you most want them to focus on, and whether you are looking for minor corrections like typos or rephrasing, ideas for new points/sections, or are open to feedback that could result in needing to rewrite the whole thing.
If asking for career advice, include your CV, and any thinking you’ve done so far. Include whether you are looking for connections (and if so, what kind), guidance, job opportunities, or something else.
Unsubscribe from all marketing or irrelevant emails. Archive anything that doesn’t require action. Move anything that does into a task manager. Keep inbox zero.
I really like these suggestions. One thing I didn’t see, which can be really helpful on the recipient side: Be ready to respond with a “pre-response response”.
For example, when I do editing for EA Forum posts, rather than let something sit until I’m ready to read through it, I might respond to the sender saying something like: “I expect to get to this by Friday. If you don’t have an email from me by then, you’re welcome to follow up and bother me about it.”
This lets the other person know I’ve seen their message and plan to respond. I might also say, if I’m really crunched for time/prioritization: “I don’t know whether I’ll have time to get to this at all; if you don’t hear from me, I’d recommend X”, where X might be “emailing someone else”, “reading an article”, “posting your piece as-is”, etc.
This is super helpful, thanks (and that’s a really awesome list of email hygiene tips, I’ve saved it).
I wonder whether educating and encouraging good email hygiene could be an easier solution (at least initially).
I think it would improve things on the margin, and also has a much smaller risk of landing us in a worse equilibrium, so it seems robustly good for people to do.
Still, I’m not super excited because if you believe that the initial mess is a coordination problem, the solution is not for individuals to put in lots of effort to be helpful; but for everyone to jointly move to another game where the low-effort/incentivised action is to cooperate rather than defect.
It’s not clear to me that we are in a mess. The only actual example you gave was a spammy corporate newsletter, which seems irrelevant.
This might look as follows: Lots of people write to senior researchers asking for feedback on papers or ideas, yet they’re mostly crackpots or uninteresting, so most stuff is not worth reading. A promising young researcher without many connections would want their feedback (and the senior researcher would want to give it!), but it simply takes too much effort to figure out that the paper is promising, so it never gets read. In fact, expecting this, the junior researcher might not even send it in the first place.
Does this happen much? Have you received feedback from people saying that this has happened to them? I expect personal networks in EA to be pretty good at connecting people—and if a young researcher is promising they can often explain why in a sentence or two (even if it’s just by name-dropping previous positions).
Currently, the signalling problem is solved by things like:
Spending lots of effort crafting interesting-sounding intros which signal that the thing is worth reading, instead of just getting to the point
Burning social capital—adding tags like “[Urgent]” or “[Important]” to the subject line
Does the latter actually happen? I’ve never seen it. Also, why is the former bad? It seems like an even better costly signal than paying money to send emails because it also produces a short description of the work which helps the recipient evaluate it. And very few people have too little time to skim a paragraph-long summary.
Well, that’s why I’m posting this—to get some data and find out :)
(I guess the title seemed to have turned a few people off, though)
In hindsight, I should have made the intended use-cases clearer in the post. I optimised for shipping it fast rather than not at all, but that had its costs.
The reason I wrote this was basically entirely motivated by problems I’ve encountered myself.
For example, I’ve spent this year trying to build an AI forecasting community, and faced the awkward problem of needing a critical mass of users, but at the same time recruiting from a base with high opportunity costs and attention value (largely EA). This usually involves a pain-staking process of thinking carefully about who we message and how much, and being quite risk-averse and rather not messaging people at all when we’re uncertain. I would have loved the ability to send paid emails, such that if we did happen to spam people, they could just claim some compensation. Moreover, this is a scalable strategy which would avoid the failure mode where project’s like ours which think a lot about attention costs get deprioritised in favour of projects which don’t.
As another example, I’ve considered unilaterally launching initiatives that seemed important and that no one was doing (like this!), but that very busy people might have reservations/opinions about. This put me in a spot of making awkward trade-offs along the lines analysed above.
In addition to that, I added on some problem that I’ve not personally experienced but which seemed like they should happen due to basic microeconomics.
This all makes sense, and it does seem that people who are launching big projects might benefit from paid emails as a norm. On the other hand, you seem unusually worried about “spamming” people by sending them things it’s pretty plausible they’d be interested in. It would be fairly easy to put at the top of your email something like “If you’re interested in doing AI forecasting, read on; otherwise feel free to ignore this email” which means the cost is something like ~10 seconds per uninterested recipient, which seems reasonable.
On a meta note, I think I felt less positively towards this post than I otherwise would have, because it felt like a call to action (which I hold to high standards) rather than an exploratory poll—e.g. I read the first few bullet points as rhetorical questions. Seems like it was just a phrasing issue; and as an exploratory poll, I think it’s interesting and I’m glad to have had the issue brought to mind :)
Great suggestions! Recently, I found it helpful to unsubscribe from the newsletters and put them into my RSS reader with the help of https://kill-the-newsletter.com.
Based on the title of this I felt initially skeptical, but after reading the full article I updated towards this being an interesting thing to try.
A few thoughts/concerns:
I seem to be unusual in that I don’t find email management particularly difficult. I unsubscribe from all marketing emails immediately, and have a strict inbox zero policy which means any emails that require an action or time-consuming response are moved to my task manager, where they can be easily prioritized. I think it’s rare that I accidentally miss an email I would have otherwise responded to; if I don’t respond it’s usually because I actively deprioritized it. The prioritization process itself doesn’t feel too taxing for me.
Thinking about the kind of emails I get, and which ones I think are worth responding to vs which ones I predict would choose to pay for a response, I find it hard to imagine that these overlap, so I’m not sure if it would be a helpful signal. I’d change my mind on this if I tried it and it turned out they did generally overlap.
If imagine myself wanting to send a busy person an email and considering using a paid email, I immediately worry about making them feel obliged to respond even if they don’t want to, or tempting them to respond even if it isn’t a good use of their time, etc. Because of this, I’m not sure it solves the social capital issue of using words like ‘urgent’ or ‘important’.
I also share Khorton’s concern about it looking weird to people outside of EA and having reputational effects.
I wonder whether educating and encouraging good email hygiene could be an easier solution (at least initially). Some email hygiene tips:
Think really hard about what you want to achieve by emailing someone. Can you achieve it another way and preserve their attention? If not, make it as easy as possible for the recipient to give you what you need.
Ask specific questions rather than open-ended questions.
Use bullets and whitespace.
Put in the extra time it takes to keep it brief.
Be polite and friendly, but get to the point. It’s usually ok to skip ‘Hope this finds you well! How was your weekend?’ etc.
Provide any necessary context as clearly and succinctly as possible (including introducing yourself or reminding them who you are or what the project is and why you are asking them specifically—remember it won’t be as fresh in their mind as it is in yours!)
Attach or link to any necessary files, documents, or resources.
Use bold text to draw the eye to important parts (e.g. due dates or actions).
If it’s a short message to broadcast some info, put it in the subject followed by ‘EOM’ (end of message) so people know they don’t need to open the email (also consider ‘NNTR’ (no need to reply)).
If asking someone to review a document, tell them which sections you most want them to focus on, and whether you are looking for minor corrections like typos or rephrasing, ideas for new points/sections, or are open to feedback that could result in needing to rewrite the whole thing.
If asking for career advice, include your CV, and any thinking you’ve done so far. Include whether you are looking for connections (and if so, what kind), guidance, job opportunities, or something else.
Unsubscribe from all marketing or irrelevant emails. Archive anything that doesn’t require action. Move anything that does into a task manager. Keep inbox zero.
I really like these suggestions. One thing I didn’t see, which can be really helpful on the recipient side: Be ready to respond with a “pre-response response”.
For example, when I do editing for EA Forum posts, rather than let something sit until I’m ready to read through it, I might respond to the sender saying something like: “I expect to get to this by Friday. If you don’t have an email from me by then, you’re welcome to follow up and bother me about it.”
This lets the other person know I’ve seen their message and plan to respond. I might also say, if I’m really crunched for time/prioritization: “I don’t know whether I’ll have time to get to this at all; if you don’t hear from me, I’d recommend X”, where X might be “emailing someone else”, “reading an article”, “posting your piece as-is”, etc.
Yes this is a great one!
This is super helpful, thanks (and that’s a really awesome list of email hygiene tips, I’ve saved it).
I think it would improve things on the margin, and also has a much smaller risk of landing us in a worse equilibrium, so it seems robustly good for people to do.
Still, I’m not super excited because if you believe that the initial mess is a coordination problem, the solution is not for individuals to put in lots of effort to be helpful; but for everyone to jointly move to another game where the low-effort/incentivised action is to cooperate rather than defect.
It’s not clear to me that we are in a mess. The only actual example you gave was a spammy corporate newsletter, which seems irrelevant.
Does this happen much? Have you received feedback from people saying that this has happened to them? I expect personal networks in EA to be pretty good at connecting people—and if a young researcher is promising they can often explain why in a sentence or two (even if it’s just by name-dropping previous positions).
Does the latter actually happen? I’ve never seen it. Also, why is the former bad? It seems like an even better costly signal than paying money to send emails because it also produces a short description of the work which helps the recipient evaluate it. And very few people have too little time to skim a paragraph-long summary.
Well, that’s why I’m posting this—to get some data and find out :)
(I guess the title seemed to have turned a few people off, though)
In hindsight, I should have made the intended use-cases clearer in the post. I optimised for shipping it fast rather than not at all, but that had its costs.
The reason I wrote this was basically entirely motivated by problems I’ve encountered myself.
For example, I’ve spent this year trying to build an AI forecasting community, and faced the awkward problem of needing a critical mass of users, but at the same time recruiting from a base with high opportunity costs and attention value (largely EA). This usually involves a pain-staking process of thinking carefully about who we message and how much, and being quite risk-averse and rather not messaging people at all when we’re uncertain. I would have loved the ability to send paid emails, such that if we did happen to spam people, they could just claim some compensation. Moreover, this is a scalable strategy which would avoid the failure mode where project’s like ours which think a lot about attention costs get deprioritised in favour of projects which don’t.
As another example, I’ve considered unilaterally launching initiatives that seemed important and that no one was doing (like this!), but that very busy people might have reservations/opinions about. This put me in a spot of making awkward trade-offs along the lines analysed above.
In addition to that, I added on some problem that I’ve not personally experienced but which seemed like they should happen due to basic microeconomics.
This all makes sense, and it does seem that people who are launching big projects might benefit from paid emails as a norm. On the other hand, you seem unusually worried about “spamming” people by sending them things it’s pretty plausible they’d be interested in. It would be fairly easy to put at the top of your email something like “If you’re interested in doing AI forecasting, read on; otherwise feel free to ignore this email” which means the cost is something like ~10 seconds per uninterested recipient, which seems reasonable.
On a meta note, I think I felt less positively towards this post than I otherwise would have, because it felt like a call to action (which I hold to high standards) rather than an exploratory poll—e.g. I read the first few bullet points as rhetorical questions. Seems like it was just a phrasing issue; and as an exploratory poll, I think it’s interesting and I’m glad to have had the issue brought to mind :)
Great suggestions! Recently, I found it helpful to unsubscribe from the newsletters and put them into my RSS reader with the help of https://kill-the-newsletter.com.