Proud Jew.
Tomer_Goloboy
Karma: 170
Do you still intend on donating a portion of your salary?
All Misercordia products are available globally ($8.00 shipping fee outside of the U.S. and Canada)! You can check out our newest E.A.-themed products here.
Done. Thank you for the inspiration!
Thank you!!
I’ll try to set that up for sure! In the meantime, you can follow us on Instagram @shop_misercordia (https://www.instagram.com/shop_misercordia/). With regards to existential hope, I’m looking into some designs for utopian cities, as well.
Thank you so much!!
You can buy them at misercordia.square.site! Thank you so much for all you’ve done!
Thank you!!
It only took ~10 hours of work. I initially drew out the original design in pastel, and then scanned it and uploaded it to Figma, after which I edited it to my needs. The other one I paid a classmate $0.50 for the design and played with the filters on Figma to design the shirt. All the shirt designs were then uploaded to CustomInk, which allows for print on demand to multiple addresses so I don’t need to have any inventory. I originally tried to create the website on Wix.com, but it was too expensive for my needs. The current website is built on Square, which is free and easy to use. It does take a cut of every transaction, but it is >2%. The domain name was free as well.
It’s pretty exceptional that we live in a time where you can go from a neat idea to a company accepting transactions within a few days.
Yes! I made a silly error when writing out “Misericordia” on the original design, but I thought it sounded cooler, so I ran with it.
Langfristigismus.
I agree with ColdButtonIssues that luxury consumer goods may be a better direction in the long term. You might be well advised to run a for-profit business (perhaps dropshipping, or other money-making schemes, like buying cheap items at garage sales and upselling them on eBay, Facebook Marketplace, etc.) and use the profits to fund the start-up costs of a bigger business. I would guess that you could make ~$10,000 with 100-200 hours of work.
I recently read “Zero to One: Notes on Startups and How to Build the Future” by Peter Thiel and “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” by Malcolm Gladwell, and they make several points that may be useful to you to bring about your dream of using the consumer economy to fund charities:
You want to start with a very small demographic, and gradually scale up. Supreme was created for a niche market, the New York City skateboarding scene, and now has stores in 14 cities and over $1 billion in equity. Perhaps you could sell clothes for E.A.s where 100% of profits go to Against Malaria Foundation or Clean Air Task Force.
You might get one or two articles written about this in the first couple of months and maybe it’s promoted by someone relative high-profile like Sam Harris.
Maybe, over time, it will become flashy in elite circles, and non-EA influencers will start promoting it. I’d expect this to take ~3-5 years in the best-case scenario.
Once a product reaches this “tipping point”, it will take off very quickly. This is difficult for a lot of founders, who are disillusioned in the first few years. You need absolute and unwavering faith that your product and vision will take off.
Three kinds of people are responsible for getting ideas to tip.
Connectors – they have a massive social network, with many acquaintances and allow ideas to spread from one social group to the next.
Salesmen – the boast about ideas they love and their incredibly positive energy is contagious.
Mavens – they hoard information, in order to be a source of great tips to their network, the people which they greatly influence with their advice.
Start-up = largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
You have a very compelling vision of the future and an interesting plan to get there. I don’t expect this step will be particularly difficult for you.
Join EA Creatives and Communicators Slack for help with design, networking, distribution, etc.
Keep posting regular updates on the project on EA Forum.
Questions to ask before starting a business:
The Engineering Q: Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?
The Timing Q: Is now the right time to start your particular business?
The monopoly Q: Are starting with a big share from a small market?
The people Q: Do you have the right team?
The distribution Q: Do you have a way to deliver your product?
The durability Q: Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?
The secret Q: Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?
I’d highly recommend you read these two books. I’d even be willing to share my Kindle account with you if you don’t want to spend money rn.
Anecdotally, I would never have heard of transhumanism if not for the U.S. transhumanist party, even though they only got a few hundred votes in the presidential election.
My suggestion would be that more people interested in Effective Altruism infrastructure donate to Giving What We Can instead of the E.A. Infrastructure Fund or CEA Community Building Fund. A community organized around effective giving is 1) better for optics; 2) better for us; 3) anecdotally, I was inducted into E.A. through global poverty, and then later got into longtermism and animal welfare by extension. Without good infrastructure and a strong culture of effective giving, E.A. will cease to be an excited and exciting (and growing) community working to solve the world’s biggest problems, and will become simply a few eccentric billionaires weird AI risk pet project.
Also, I think that a book which you would really resonate with is Wisdom to Heal the Earth: Meditations and Teachings of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson by Rabbi Tzvi Freeman. A lot of the teachings about the Messiah and the Messianic age start to make sense when viewed from a longtermism paradigm.
God bless,
Tomer
I just read this article, and I think your ideas are beautiful and should be spread further throughout the E.A. community. Is there any way that this article could be rewritten to be more palatable to an E.A. audience, perhaps by removing quotes from the Bible and Qur’an, and changing the title to something like “The Singularity and Its Metaphysical Implications.” I’ll share with you a draft of what I’m thinking of. Love what you’re doing man, keep at it!
There are several authors who are somewhat E.A.-aligned like Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, etc. who we should work on recruiting to write books from them in the future about E.A. Also, I would a verbal history of E.A. simply for the reason of, if it got optioned for movie rights, who would play Will Macaskill. I have my bets on Liam Hemsworth.
Someone who has contributed to Jewish thought in this area (i.e. our individual power to usher in a messianic age—similar to what many E.A.‘s believe longtermist interventions (and neartermist interventions, to some extent) can bring about—is The Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, of blessed memory. A great book on this (which I’m reading right now) is “Wisdom to Heal the Earth—Meditations and Teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe” by Tzvi Freeman. The focus on ‘Tikkun Olam’ also aligns with a lot of the progressive Jewish messaging I’ve seen in recent years anyways.
I think this is definitely feasible. I was convinced by the ideas of Effective Altruism as early as age 12 and donated a significant portion of my Bar Mitzvah gifts to The Life You Can Save.
Could you explain what “Embodied virtue ethics and neo-Taoism as credible alternatives to consequentialism that deserve seats in the moral congress” would mean for cause prioritization in E.A.? I’m not familiar with either of those concepts.
What are the odds of extinction from nuclear, AI, bio, climate change, etc.?
His thoughts on the threat of “population collapse”?
How work on existential risk compares to work on animal welfare and global poverty in expected value (is it 50% better? 100x better?)
How does work on animal welfare and global poverty affect existential risk and the quality of the long-term future?
Where do Nick Bostrom, Toby Ord, Eliezer Yudkowsky, etc. go wrong that leads them to believe in substantially higher levels of AI risk than you?
What new E.A. projects would you like to see which haven’t been recommended by OpenPhil, FTX Future Fund, etc.
Do you believe in the perrenialist philosophy (the perspective in philosophy and spirituality that views all of the world’s religious traditions share a single, metaphysical truth or origin from which all esoteric and exoteric knowledge and doctrine has grown)? What would the discovery of absolute truth mean for the long-term future?
What problems need to be solved before we’ve created the “best possible world”? Or can we just rely on AGI to solve our problems?
Which values (besides MCE) are important for making sure the future goes well?
How can we “improve institutions to promote development” as is recommended as a potentially pressing longtermist issue by 80000 Hours?
What bad, non-extinction risks does AI pose?
Does E.A. underestimate the importance of becoming a space-faring species for ensuring the survival of humanity?
How can we prevent totalitarianism?
Where do you differ from SBF on E.A. priorities? How would you spend $1 billion?