I’m still a bit confused—that’s a lot of books, especially since they are all in Russian! And 18k hardcover! I’m a bit more credulous about the impact of such an effort than others—actual insight in the books is less important than having a fun attraction to adjacent ideas. It’s worked before: the growth of less wrong may be partly attributable to this and analogously some films, eg The China Syndrome, film/sci-fi novel nuclear doom conceptions may have had significant impact in molding the attitudes of the public.
Butstill that’s a lot of books! And if I understand correctly, with no connection to the ones which were (or weren’t?) successfully distributed by the 28k in grant money, before the project ended.
Why so many? What fraction of original copies made have been successfully distributed? I understand that this wasn’t from grant money, I’m just curious about the story here is all.
Edit: saw this. So apparently 68k originally. Wow!
21k copies/61k hardcover books, each book ~630 pages long, yep!
I agree that most of the impact is from a fun attraction to adjacent ideas, not from what the book itself communicates.
No connection to the grant, yep.
It was a crowdfunding campaign, and I committed to spend at least as much on books and shipping costs (including to libraries and for educational/science popularization purposes) as we’ve received through the campaign. We’ve then run out of that money and had to spend our own (about 2.2m rubles so far) to send the books to winners of olympiads and libraries and also buy a bunch of copies of Human Compatible and The Precipice (we were able to get discounted prices). On average, it costs us around $5 to deliver a copy to a door.
We’ve distributed around 15k copies in total so far, most to the crowdfunding participants.
We also have 6k more copies (18k hard-cover books) left. We have no idea what to do with them. Suggestions are welcome.
Here’s a map of Russian libraries that requested copies of HPMOR, and we’ve sent 2126 copies to:
Sending HPMOR to random libraries is cool, but I hope someone comes up with better ways of spending the books.
I’m still a bit confused—that’s a lot of books, especially since they are all in Russian! And 18k hardcover! I’m a bit more credulous about the impact of such an effort than others—actual insight in the books is less important than having a fun attraction to adjacent ideas. It’s worked before: the growth of less wrong may be partly attributable to this and analogously some films, eg The China Syndrome, film/sci-fi novel nuclear doom conceptions may have had significant impact in molding the attitudes of the public.
But still that’s a lot of books! And if I understand correctly, with no connection to the ones which were (or weren’t?) successfully distributed by the 28k in grant money, before the project ended.
Why so many? What fraction of original copies made have been successfully distributed? I understand that this wasn’t from grant money, I’m just curious about the story here is all.
Edit: saw this. So apparently 68k originally. Wow!
21k copies/61k hardcover books, each book ~630 pages long, yep!
I agree that most of the impact is from a fun attraction to adjacent ideas, not from what the book itself communicates.
No connection to the grant, yep.
It was a crowdfunding campaign, and I committed to spend at least as much on books and shipping costs (including to libraries and for educational/science popularization purposes) as we’ve received through the campaign. We’ve then run out of that money and had to spend our own (about 2.2m rubles so far) to send the books to winners of olympiads and libraries and also buy a bunch of copies of Human Compatible and The Precipice (we were able to get discounted prices). On average, it costs us around $5 to deliver a copy to a door.
We’ve distributed around 15k copies in total so far, most to the crowdfunding participants.