I generally agree with the reasons given in this article about why you wouldn’t want to subsidize your services to EAs or offer them for free, and I agree with the counter-reasons why you might want to do it anyway. I think I weight them differently from you, such that I’m more ready to believe that offering a subsidized or free service can be defensible.
I think I’m less convinced by market signals than you, and more convinced you can notice people making a systematic mistake in how they price something. Obviously there’s a huge conflict of interest when you’re making this claim about your own work, so you should really try to have some independent cross-check of your value, but I don’t find it hard to believe that someone can nevertheless come to reasonably believe something like this is true.
For example, recently-graduated students (or even students still in studies) probably have a hard time justifying high expenses, even when they will eventually pay for themselves. Say you could deliver a salary negotiation class that for 50% of people raised their lifetime earnings by 10%. How much should they value that class, knowing what you know? How much should they value that class, given that they don’t know what you know and can’t necessarily trust you? How much will they be able to pay for the class, even if they wanted to? In abstract ideal economics land, you can sometimes fix issues like these by offering loans or grants, selling fractions of future earnings or whatever, but in the real world I think things like that will have pretty serious friction and you’ll end up being able to deliver to nowhere near the same number of people.
Taking a step back, maybe the idea here is: you need some reason to believe that what you’re doing is working. Different feedback signals have different virtues and drawbacks: people paying you is great because it’s the prototypical costly signal, so people will tend to give you their honest assessment of your value, but it doesn’t particularly force their honest assessment of your value to be correct. Other signals might have more or better information.
I think people considering offering a free or subsidized service to EAs should read this article first, but if they come away thinking they have good reasons to disagree, I’m willing to believe them.
I generally agree with the reasons given in this article about why you wouldn’t want to subsidize your services to EAs or offer them for free, and I agree with the counter-reasons why you might want to do it anyway. I think I weight them differently from you, such that I’m more ready to believe that offering a subsidized or free service can be defensible.
I think I’m less convinced by market signals than you, and more convinced you can notice people making a systematic mistake in how they price something. Obviously there’s a huge conflict of interest when you’re making this claim about your own work, so you should really try to have some independent cross-check of your value, but I don’t find it hard to believe that someone can nevertheless come to reasonably believe something like this is true.
For example, recently-graduated students (or even students still in studies) probably have a hard time justifying high expenses, even when they will eventually pay for themselves. Say you could deliver a salary negotiation class that for 50% of people raised their lifetime earnings by 10%. How much should they value that class, knowing what you know? How much should they value that class, given that they don’t know what you know and can’t necessarily trust you? How much will they be able to pay for the class, even if they wanted to? In abstract ideal economics land, you can sometimes fix issues like these by offering loans or grants, selling fractions of future earnings or whatever, but in the real world I think things like that will have pretty serious friction and you’ll end up being able to deliver to nowhere near the same number of people.
Taking a step back, maybe the idea here is: you need some reason to believe that what you’re doing is working. Different feedback signals have different virtues and drawbacks: people paying you is great because it’s the prototypical costly signal, so people will tend to give you their honest assessment of your value, but it doesn’t particularly force their honest assessment of your value to be correct. Other signals might have more or better information.
I think people considering offering a free or subsidized service to EAs should read this article first, but if they come away thinking they have good reasons to disagree, I’m willing to believe them.