To me it sounds like you’re underestimating the value of handing out books: I think books are great because you can get someone to engage with EA ideas for ~10 hours, without it taking up any of your precious time.
As you said, I think books can be combined with mailing lists. (If there was a tradeoff, I would estimate they’re similarly good: You can either get a ~20% probability of getting someone to engage for ~10h via a book, or a ~5%(? most people don’t read newsletters) probability of getting someone to engage for ~40h via a mailing list. And while I’d rather have one person engage deeply than many people engage shallowly, I think the first few engagement hours tend to be more valuable (less overdetermined) than the ones that follow later.)
I think I disagree with those fermis for engagement time.
My prior is that in general, people are happier to watch videos than to read online articles, and they’re happier to read online articles than to read books. The total time per year spent reading books is pretty tiny. (Eg I think all time spent reading DGB is about 100k hours, which is only ~1yr of the 80k podcast or GiveWell’s site.)
I expect that if you sign someone up to a newsletter and give them a book at the same time, they’re much more likely to read a bunch of links from the newsletter than they are to read the book.
With our newsletter, the open rate is typically 20-30%, and it’s usually higher for the first couple of emails someone gets. About 20% of subs read most of the emails, which go out ~3 times per month. The half life is several years (e.g. 1.5% unsubscribe per month gives you a half life of over 3yr). I don’t think our figures are especially good vs. other newsletters.
If you give someone a book, I expect the chance they finish it is under 10%, rather than 20%.
The other point is about follow up. I think book with no follow up might be almost no value.
A case study is South Korea. DGB had top tier media coverage and sold around 30k copies, but I’ve never heard of any key EAs resulting from that. (Though hopefully if we set up south korean orgs now we’d have an easier time.)
The explanation could be almost no-one becomes a committed EA just from reading – lots of one-on-one discussions are basically necessary. And it takes several years for most people.
There are lots of ways to achieve this follow up. If a book is given out in the context of a local group, maybe that’s enough. But my thinking is that if you sign someone up to a newsletter (or other subscription), you’ve already (partly) automated the process. As well as sending them more articles, you can send them events, job adverts, invites to one-on-ones etc. I’m confident it’s more reliable than hoping they reach out again based on their own initiative.
This also matches my model. I think book completion rates are quite low, and I expect book distribution without followup to have very little effect. In my Fermis this can make book distribution still come out reasonably high, but it doesn’t tend to come out competitive with the best other interventions I’ve thought of.
I think there are ways to increase completion and followup rates, mostly by getting people to give books to their friends instead of doing broad distributions, but that also tends to be a bit harder to scale.
In 80K’s The Precipice mailing experiment, 15% of recipients reported reading the book in full after a month, and ~7% of people reported reading at least half.
I’m also aware of some anecdotal cases where books seemed pretty good—e.g., I know of a very promising person who got highly involved with longtermism within a few months primarily based on reading The Precipice.
The South Korea case study is pretty damning, though. I wonder if things would look better if there had been a small number of promising people who help onboard newly interested ones (or whether that was already the case and it didn’t work despite that).
I’d be pretty interested in engagement hours based on email clicks, if you have that data. I care less about open rates and more about whether someone goes on to read through key ideas pages for several hours based on that.
All that said, the high open rates you mentioned have updated me somewhat towards mailing lists being more valuable than I previously thought.
To me it sounds like you’re underestimating the value of handing out books: I think books are great because you can get someone to engage with EA ideas for ~10 hours, without it taking up any of your precious time.
As you said, I think books can be combined with mailing lists. (If there was a tradeoff, I would estimate they’re similarly good: You can either get a ~20% probability of getting someone to engage for ~10h via a book, or a ~5%(? most people don’t read newsletters) probability of getting someone to engage for ~40h via a mailing list. And while I’d rather have one person engage deeply than many people engage shallowly, I think the first few engagement hours tend to be more valuable (less overdetermined) than the ones that follow later.)
I think I disagree with those fermis for engagement time.
My prior is that in general, people are happier to watch videos than to read online articles, and they’re happier to read online articles than to read books. The total time per year spent reading books is pretty tiny. (Eg I think all time spent reading DGB is about 100k hours, which is only ~1yr of the 80k podcast or GiveWell’s site.)
I expect that if you sign someone up to a newsletter and give them a book at the same time, they’re much more likely to read a bunch of links from the newsletter than they are to read the book.
With our newsletter, the open rate is typically 20-30%, and it’s usually higher for the first couple of emails someone gets. About 20% of subs read most of the emails, which go out ~3 times per month. The half life is several years (e.g. 1.5% unsubscribe per month gives you a half life of over 3yr). I don’t think our figures are especially good vs. other newsletters.
If you give someone a book, I expect the chance they finish it is under 10%, rather than 20%.
The other point is about follow up. I think book with no follow up might be almost no value.
A case study is South Korea. DGB had top tier media coverage and sold around 30k copies, but I’ve never heard of any key EAs resulting from that. (Though hopefully if we set up south korean orgs now we’d have an easier time.)
The explanation could be almost no-one becomes a committed EA just from reading – lots of one-on-one discussions are basically necessary. And it takes several years for most people.
There are lots of ways to achieve this follow up. If a book is given out in the context of a local group, maybe that’s enough. But my thinking is that if you sign someone up to a newsletter (or other subscription), you’ve already (partly) automated the process. As well as sending them more articles, you can send them events, job adverts, invites to one-on-ones etc. I’m confident it’s more reliable than hoping they reach out again based on their own initiative.
This also matches my model. I think book completion rates are quite low, and I expect book distribution without followup to have very little effect. In my Fermis this can make book distribution still come out reasonably high, but it doesn’t tend to come out competitive with the best other interventions I’ve thought of.
I think there are ways to increase completion and followup rates, mostly by getting people to give books to their friends instead of doing broad distributions, but that also tends to be a bit harder to scale.
In 80K’s The Precipice mailing experiment, 15% of recipients reported reading the book in full after a month, and ~7% of people reported reading at least half.
I’m also aware of some anecdotal cases where books seemed pretty good—e.g., I know of a very promising person who got highly involved with longtermism within a few months primarily based on reading The Precipice.
The South Korea case study is pretty damning, though. I wonder if things would look better if there had been a small number of promising people who help onboard newly interested ones (or whether that was already the case and it didn’t work despite that).
I’d be pretty interested in engagement hours based on email clicks, if you have that data. I care less about open rates and more about whether someone goes on to read through key ideas pages for several hours based on that.
All that said, the high open rates you mentioned have updated me somewhat towards mailing lists being more valuable than I previously thought.