I think it’d be worthwhile to try advertising longtermist websites and books to people (targeting by interests/location to the largest extent possible). I think it’s been tried a bit (e.g. at the tens of thousands of dollars scale) years ago, and it was already nearly at the threshold for cost-effectiveness. And funding availability has more than doubled since then. What I don’t know is what further experiments have been run in the last two years...
I think there’s a lot of potential value here. On the other hand, such work would have to be fairly carefully.
A large publicity push to get people into the longtermist community could easily backfire, similar to the problem of expanding the EA community too quickly. The specific longtermist concerns (AGI risks, biosafety risks) could also be net harmful if presented sloppily.
Quality discussion and targeting would help with these concerns, but right now I think only a few potential people would actually be trusted and capable to do such work.
If anyone is reading this and would be interested in pursuing this, let me know, and I’ll try to figure out the right other people to contact. I imagine this could be a good fit for a new project, but it would have to be done with the right team.
I would say though that if a promising team was interested, and if they were trusted by the main longtermists/funders, it seems like a very promising opportunity for funding.
If the intervention is more, “We should just have some people with domain expertise in digital marketing to help EA organizations”, that’s much easier to integrate.
I have domain expertise in digital marketing and would love to help EA organizations. I’m not qualified to weigh in on the questions of messaging or how far-reaching the campaign should be, but once those things are figured out I can tell you the best way to use YouTube and Google Search to accomplish your goals.
Ultimately it’s the funder who’ll judge that. But if I had all of the donors’ funds, maybe I’d pay ~$1B to double the size of the EA movement (~3k->~6k) while preserving its average quality?
Interesting, so that comes to a cost-effectiveness of $333,333 per highly engaged EA, which doesn’t seem that cost-effective to me. $33,333 or $3,333 per person (so $100M or $10M to get 3k more EAs) sound like better numbers to me, and I think those numbers are actually quite doable.
CEA’s Community Building Grants seem like they could approach the $33,333 or $3,333 per person number, though it’s not that highly scalable.
For me, the takeaway is that the actual cost of generating interest in EA (Brian’s $4 cost per graduated EA fellow from below) is significantly below our little group’s estimates of what an engaged EA is worth ($3K -$30K as noted above).
I think everyone would agree an engaged EA is worth more than $4.
If someone is reading this who would know how to scale FB ads for EA university fellowships that seems like an extremely high impact thing to do.
I think it’d be worthwhile to try advertising longtermist websites and books to people (targeting by interests/location to the largest extent possible). I think it’s been tried a bit (e.g. at the tens of thousands of dollars scale) years ago, and it was already nearly at the threshold for cost-effectiveness. And funding availability has more than doubled since then. What I don’t know is what further experiments have been run in the last two years...
I’ve looked a bit into this.
I think there’s a lot of potential value here. On the other hand, such work would have to be fairly carefully.
A large publicity push to get people into the longtermist community could easily backfire, similar to the problem of expanding the EA community too quickly. The specific longtermist concerns (AGI risks, biosafety risks) could also be net harmful if presented sloppily.
Quality discussion and targeting would help with these concerns, but right now I think only a few potential people would actually be trusted and capable to do such work.
If anyone is reading this and would be interested in pursuing this, let me know, and I’ll try to figure out the right other people to contact. I imagine this could be a good fit for a new project, but it would have to be done with the right team.
I would say though that if a promising team was interested, and if they were trusted by the main longtermists/funders, it seems like a very promising opportunity for funding.
If the intervention is more, “We should just have some people with domain expertise in digital marketing to help EA organizations”, that’s much easier to integrate.
I have domain expertise in digital marketing and would love to help EA organizations. I’m not qualified to weigh in on the questions of messaging or how far-reaching the campaign should be, but once those things are figured out I can tell you the best way to use YouTube and Google Search to accomplish your goals.
What would you say is the threshold for cost-effectiveness?
Ultimately it’s the funder who’ll judge that. But if I had all of the donors’ funds, maybe I’d pay ~$1B to double the size of the EA movement (~3k->~6k) while preserving its average quality?
Interesting, so that comes to a cost-effectiveness of $333,333 per highly engaged EA, which doesn’t seem that cost-effective to me. $33,333 or $3,333 per person (so $100M or $10M to get 3k more EAs) sound like better numbers to me, and I think those numbers are actually quite doable.
CEA’s Community Building Grants seem like they could approach the $33,333 or $3,333 per person number, though it’s not that highly scalable.
For me, the takeaway is that the actual cost of generating interest in EA (Brian’s $4 cost per graduated EA fellow from below) is significantly below our little group’s estimates of what an engaged EA is worth ($3K -$30K as noted above).
I think everyone would agree an engaged EA is worth more than $4.
If someone is reading this who would know how to scale FB ads for EA university fellowships that seems like an extremely high impact thing to do.