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 :)
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 :)