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.
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.