“People respect and are impressed by those who are making big sacrifices for the benefit of others. Note how much attention and respect from important figures Toby Ord has gotten by pledging a large fraction of his income. Also the kudos generally given to doctors, soldiers, firefighters, Mother Teresa, etc.”
Attention and admiration, absolutely. But how much copying? I would expect people to be most drawn to people who seem to be only ‘one step’ more self-sacrificing than they are, in a conceptual framework that I suppose is analogous to the idea of inferential distance. For instance, I think Toby benefits in this from having an ‘ordinary’ income. Anything further away than that rapidly becomes too weird to be taking seriously. Note Jeff Kaufman has written about pretty much exactly this:
One weak support for the idea that these examples are sufficiently far away for most people to dismiss without much thought is the very fact media happily talks about them; this would make them less challenging and cognitive-dissonance inducing, so others’ dominant impressions on reading are to be impressed rather than unsettled.
The fact that each person is less impacted has to be weighed against the fact that about 100,000-1,000,000 times as many people have heard about what Toby is doing than someone who just privately gave a few percent of income.
Of course we need examples of more typical people to refer to as well.
No way, the main media interest was in the extremeness of the amount. The press wouldn’t care about or cover Giving What We Can if the ask was 1% and Toby was giving 1%.
Most of GWWC’s exposure is through word of mouth. This is even truer for the exposure that matters, and that leads to people signing up, much of which is through meeting Giving What We Can members.
The idea that 99.99% of the exposure of Giving What We Can would have disappeared if they couldn’t focus on Toby’s generosity could only result from very unclear thinking. The press would’ve just looked different. Trivially, other members would have given a large fraction even if Toby hadn’t told them to, and press could’ve focussed on that. The example is The Life You Can Save. Granted, it had Peter Singer, but I hope that we’re not going to have the discussion that without Peter, they could’ve still aroused at least 0.1% of the same press. I mean, EA Melbourne has been able to give talks, go on community radio et cetera without citing the 10% figure...
Like, I know things like press can have weird power law distributions but we’re really short-changing the exposure of the rest of GWWC’s message—the parts that are about quality of donation—if we say that 100,000 of its exposure is just because of the quality.
So although the benefits for exposure of of giving 10% are presumably there, and they might matter a lot, they’re like 2-10x.
“The idea that 99.99% of the exposure of Giving What We Can would have disappeared if they couldn’t focus on Toby’s generosity could only result from very unclear thinking.”
Yes, but this is what you said: “Although Toby’s story is only about 2-10x more widely known compared to if he gave 1% and still founded GWWC.”
You may think GWWC would have similar numbers of members today because of how it grows person-to-person, but his story would be much less known because there would basically be no story to report on. Someone gives 1% of charity and encourages others to do the same? It’s not newsworthy. As it was, it got to the most read stories on BBC News and other similar outlets and literally millions (maybe tens of millions) of people heard about him.
Furthermore, I think that media exposure was necessary to turn Giving What We Can from just a group of friends in Oxford into the going concern it is today. That story isn’t as valuable today, but it was the main asset we had in the early days.
Haha Rob it’s Christmas, can’t we stop fighting? Because I’m right, and you should convert to my point of view. :|
But seriously, you’re saying that if Toby had given 1% instead of 50%, then rather than 10 million people knowing his story, rather than 10 million people knowing about him, only 10-100 people would? That simply not reasonable. Without press, even if each of the handful of academics who signed up for GWWC had mentioned it in their opening lectures that semester, you would already have a thousand people who had heard the story.
Haha, let’s split the difference. Maybe 100,000 people would have heard of Toby, so 1-2 orders of magnitude? I think that’s enough for me to make my point that it could be better overall, even if each person takes the example less seriously. :P
“People respect and are impressed by those who are making big sacrifices for the benefit of others. Note how much attention and respect from important figures Toby Ord has gotten by pledging a large fraction of his income. Also the kudos generally given to doctors, soldiers, firefighters, Mother Teresa, etc.”
Attention and admiration, absolutely. But how much copying? I would expect people to be most drawn to people who seem to be only ‘one step’ more self-sacrificing than they are, in a conceptual framework that I suppose is analogous to the idea of inferential distance. For instance, I think Toby benefits in this from having an ‘ordinary’ income. Anything further away than that rapidly becomes too weird to be taking seriously. Note Jeff Kaufman has written about pretty much exactly this:
http://www.jefftk.com/p/optimizing-looks-weird
One weak support for the idea that these examples are sufficiently far away for most people to dismiss without much thought is the very fact media happily talks about them; this would make them less challenging and cognitive-dissonance inducing, so others’ dominant impressions on reading are to be impressed rather than unsettled.
The fact that each person is less impacted has to be weighed against the fact that about 100,000-1,000,000 times as many people have heard about what Toby is doing than someone who just privately gave a few percent of income.
Of course we need examples of more typical people to refer to as well.
Although Toby’s story is only about 2-10x more widely known compared to if he gave 1% and still founded GWWC.
No way, the main media interest was in the extremeness of the amount. The press wouldn’t care about or cover Giving What We Can if the ask was 1% and Toby was giving 1%.
Most of GWWC’s exposure is through word of mouth. This is even truer for the exposure that matters, and that leads to people signing up, much of which is through meeting Giving What We Can members.
The idea that 99.99% of the exposure of Giving What We Can would have disappeared if they couldn’t focus on Toby’s generosity could only result from very unclear thinking. The press would’ve just looked different. Trivially, other members would have given a large fraction even if Toby hadn’t told them to, and press could’ve focussed on that. The example is The Life You Can Save. Granted, it had Peter Singer, but I hope that we’re not going to have the discussion that without Peter, they could’ve still aroused at least 0.1% of the same press. I mean, EA Melbourne has been able to give talks, go on community radio et cetera without citing the 10% figure...
Like, I know things like press can have weird power law distributions but we’re really short-changing the exposure of the rest of GWWC’s message—the parts that are about quality of donation—if we say that 100,000 of its exposure is just because of the quality.
So although the benefits for exposure of of giving 10% are presumably there, and they might matter a lot, they’re like 2-10x.
“The idea that 99.99% of the exposure of Giving What We Can would have disappeared if they couldn’t focus on Toby’s generosity could only result from very unclear thinking.”
Yes, but this is what you said: “Although Toby’s story is only about 2-10x more widely known compared to if he gave 1% and still founded GWWC.”
You may think GWWC would have similar numbers of members today because of how it grows person-to-person, but his story would be much less known because there would basically be no story to report on. Someone gives 1% of charity and encourages others to do the same? It’s not newsworthy. As it was, it got to the most read stories on BBC News and other similar outlets and literally millions (maybe tens of millions) of people heard about him.
Furthermore, I think that media exposure was necessary to turn Giving What We Can from just a group of friends in Oxford into the going concern it is today. That story isn’t as valuable today, but it was the main asset we had in the early days.
Haha Rob it’s Christmas, can’t we stop fighting? Because I’m right, and you should convert to my point of view. :|
But seriously, you’re saying that if Toby had given 1% instead of 50%, then rather than 10 million people knowing his story, rather than 10 million people knowing about him, only 10-100 people would? That simply not reasonable. Without press, even if each of the handful of academics who signed up for GWWC had mentioned it in their opening lectures that semester, you would already have a thousand people who had heard the story.
Haha, let’s split the difference. Maybe 100,000 people would have heard of Toby, so 1-2 orders of magnitude? I think that’s enough for me to make my point that it could be better overall, even if each person takes the example less seriously. :P