Effective Altruism and Its Future
eigenrobot.substack.com
eigenrobot.substack.com
The proposals to prevent the movement being co-opted are proposals that also prevent the movement functioning. The proposals seem to be to prioritize being ideologically pure over being effective. Which is odd, because it's literally meant to be effective. There's a tension here that the author thinks that it's bad to allow this certain class of people use your movement for influence, but in doing so essentially legislates against the movement being able to use influence itself. EA isn't just about making sure your money is effective, it's also about incentivizing charities to be more effective - that's exactly what GiveWell. You can view GiveWell donating to CHAI as a corrupt revolving door, or you can say GiveWell successfully has managed to drive EA into the broader industry, and now, with someone versed in how EA works is able to drive money into that charity. The optimist view is as valid as the cynical view, and the EA view would be neither, it would be to focus on what actually happens with that donation.
Then one starts questioning, what is the real motivation behind the deed?
The other problem is that treating people like statistics is ugly, even if you are doing it for a good cause.
At the moment you impersonalize this, all the game changes. But the worst part of this game is that there are a group of "well-intentioned" people that tell you what is good or bad not for your neighbour, but for human kind or the like.
These people are usually the worst of all because they play this game with personal incentives to manage the lives/wealth of others.
There is a very big difference between "helping others" and "helping your neighbour", where the latter is, surprisingly, quite better than the former.
When you think everyone should "help others" what we do is to delegate responsibility in impersonal organizations, often the state, and we feel no responsibility for it, after all, we already do our job by paying taxes.
I assert this is the wrong approach: we have to go back to thinking on helping our immediate environment. Why? Because if all of us do that, we have a bit better world and by human nature we do have more incentive to help in this way than through a central organization that often does not want to help, but that it is also very inefficient in helping.
If we all delegate, we skip responsibility and the people who are responsible for it, for them you are just a number and they have their own incentives. Also let me tell you that I do not think they are really worried about helping, but about benefiting themselves more than anything else with a custom of good will on top of them.
There are even experiments about these things. Human nature has incentive. If you change the incentives, you change the behaviors.
This is one of the fundamental reasons why I am against taxes or, more in general, making others paying the price of the decisions of others, not necessarily taxes.
Accelerating the development of developing countries enables us to have more minds working on actually difficult tasks like curing cancer in all of its forms, managing and curing our planet, curing diseases that plague humanity, and finally advance our civilization.
If all the help you can provide is isolated to your local neighborhood, you are stuck with well off neighborhoods improving logarithmically with time and money spent because they are well past the inflection point, and everyone else struggling to improve because they lack the resources, and likely facing the same issues the well off community faced and solved before, enabling even more waste of time (and therefore money).
Local improvements do not propagate further if you are isolated, and thus you miss the big picture.
This by the way is a well studied phenomenon and is the core difference between "conservatives" and "progressives", where the former considers their local community, but the latter considers systematic improvements. From my experience, the latter understands that the issues faced by other communities are issues they could have faced as well, and therefore see it as their responsibility to help them.
Helping the neighbour is a metaphor. It means helping to concrete people with concrete actions.
It does not need to be your neighbor, you can go for missions in developing countries if you want (I live in a developing country right now).
To give you an example, a group of friends here once helped a person we know with the money for heart surgery, something people here cannot pay.
Instead of "oh, all we want free health care" and ask everyone else to pay the costs (to the rich!, to the blabla, etc.) and give the money to a bureaucrat so that they do with the money god knows what (you did not see the villas they own! Amazing!) what we did is to help a person we know we are really helping with their disease. Much more effective if you ask me.
> Local improvements do not propagate further if you are isolated, and thus you miss the big picture.
Development aids usually end up in the pocket of bureaucrats. It is better that you go do something for someone, even in a remote place and see what is going on than to just give to see what happens, which also, as I said, make people skip their worries: oh, we already give these people that, we are not bad. This is just a mechanism to feel better. It is just that it is not what happens. Bureaucrats can control the flow of money and we all know there is corruption and a lot of inefficiencies as well in how it is managed. What they cannot control is personal decisions where things do not go through them. So if we have good intentions, I think the best we can do is to do by ourselves or through the people we trust.
> This by the way is a well studied phenomenon and is the core difference between "conservatives" and "progressives"
No, this is a well-known thing in psychology where there have been experiments with groups of people where the more people you put, at the moment of simulating things like heart attacks, etc. to see how they reacted, when there is only one person there they try super fast to help, the more people you put the more "other will do it" happens.
> where the former considers their local community, but the latter considers systematic improvements
I still have to see what those systematic improvements collectivism has brought to the world in the broad sense. All of it starts in individual decisions and are usually better brought up when incentives fall on a few, not on too many.
> From my experience, the latter understands that the issues faced by other communities are issues they could have faced as well, and therefore see it as their responsibility to help them
This is not what happens in practice. If you are worried about others as in "progressive" as you define it, you still get your nice clothes, your Iphone and many other things as there are still people in trouble. If it is your brother or your mother or a very good friend there is a strong trend for you willing to sacrifice all those things if necessary. This is not bad or good, this is human nature, whether you like it or not.
I am pretty convinced that among the people that want to "help others" in the general sense, talking about people with real ambitions to rule, not normal people with good intentions, we have the worst people. Because they put a custom on top of them for marketing, but their real intentions are not those. But even with good intentions, there is the problem of calculus from a centralized organization. So it is more inefficient than alternative mechanisms.
Firstly it's clearly not true in a practical sense. Collective health care is far more efficient than private health care with donations, because collective health care can bypass executive greed and set sensible prices. Individual health care is at the mercy of markets run by amoral people, so you end up with 500,000 people being bankrupted every year, even though they have health insurance.
Ask any diabetic in the US how well that's working for them.
Secondly it's not true ethically. Some people will do anything for friends and family, others won't lift a finger. Should the friends and family of the latter not be helped?
Thirdly the "more people -> less action" argument is clearly wrong on a collective scale, precisely because you employ individuals who are paid to provide professional help.
So your heart attack patient isn't rescued by a caring amateur who may have no clue what to do, but by a professional paramedic and eventually a doctor who does.
The doctor and paramedic are paid with taxes because all the evidence shows that is cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable universal option than privatised health care with copays and exclusions and all the other scams.
Taxes are better than charity because in a collectively oriented system even with inefficiencies you don't get the patchy, random, whimsically motivated and unreliable care offered by charity and philanthropy.
And it's not as if corporations aren't also bureaucracies - but without any possibility of democratic accountability.
:)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-26/the-world...
This just shows that it can be much cheaper than it is. The rate of success of those hospitals is not correlated to their price compared to their american counterparts.
It is arranged in the most efficient way possible. This expands the reach of the people that can access health care in India. I do think it is a revolution.
It is in the lines of (of course, with limitations) "what if health care could be as cheap as food?"
Imagine the revolution.
How come they built this? Yes, the profit motive is there. Without that incentive probably it would not be the same. Human incentive again.
"Shetty aims to trim costs with such measures as buying cheaper scrubs and using cross ventilation instead of air conditioning.[17] That has cut the price of coronary bypass surgery to 95,000 rupees ($1,583), half of what it was 20 years ago.[3] In 2013 he aimed to get the price down to $800 within a decade. The same procedure costs $106,385 at Ohio's Cleveland Clinic"
We can do better, right? No, it does not need to be public, just efficient.
> Profit margins of the healthcare industry as an aggregate are a single digit percentage
Link these two together and what you are saying is that we can assist fewer people because of efficiency problems. A failure in my eyes. I would be willing to put my money in a system like Shetty hospitals (as an investor) to improve the lives of people. But no, I have to do it through a tax system because yes and this has consequences. Even you recognize it in some way if you link those two propositions.
This is not my point either. I mean, I know there is scale playing there.
> Secondly it's not true ethically. Some people will do anything for friends and family, others won't lift a finger.
It is a trend, not an absolute. Also, none of us can be blamed for all the bad things in the world. We act as we deem appropriate and we can even interpret or understand things different, let alone have a different value scale.
> Thirdly the "more people -> less action" argument is clearly wrong on a collective scale
There are experiments. In psychology. When you add to a group, the responsibility starts to be "fuzzy" and we act different.
> because you employ individuals who are paid to provide professional help.
Yes, like psychologists without a license here in Spain for mistreatment of women in Andalucia put by friends of the administration without a need even to publish the name, surname, test score and ID. Curious, right? I wonder if I had to search one for a relative or friend if I would choose such "professionals" that I paid coactively with my money or I'd rather go for what I think is appropriate. What happens is that there is an enormous incentive for client systems in the public administration. And it shows clearly. Being democracies the most corrupt of those systems, since the more favors you do, the more chances you have to stay, without any care for taking fair decisions. Not meaning I am against or for democracies though, but it is clearly their worst defect. Of course I say all this with a good knowledge of Spain, other countries may vary.
> So your heart attack patient isn't rescued by a caring amateur who may have no clue what to do
The topic is not about that. The topic is about how fast are people willing to react to gather help depending on the safe nets they have among them. When people know noone else will do it, they react faster. In the opposite direction, they start to ignore the problems.
> The doctor and paramedic are paid with taxes because all the evidence shows that is cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable universal
Really? In Spain, btw my sis is a doctor, they get a shitty bill. Now we are in lack of doctors because they are not paid what they should and go abroad. Are you sure it is "cheaper"? Or what you mean is that it looks cheap bc they pay a sh*t and people keep leaving and there is a lack of them?
> Taxes are better than charity because in a collectively oriented system even with inefficiencies you don't get the patchy
No, taxes are not better because they are allocated by bureaucrats according to their criteria and you pay coactively. They pay no penalty for their bad decisions either. It is the worst possible system. Of course, it is not the same if they spend 10-30% of your taxes than if they use over 50% (like they do with me). The criteria to allocate is different. Remember that the administration is managed by humans, not gods, with the same defects and incentives we have: they might (and they do! as in the psychologists in Andalucia thing) prefer to have a few friends in the administration that will favor them over having good treatment for mistreated women. It works like this.
I see you believe in collective systems. Me too. But just in the ones where:
1. you have effective control on where the expenses go. 2. they are planned like a private business, with non-infinitely flexible budgets paid 3. if someone does not do a good job, they must be out of that management, paying for their mistakes
As long as those incentives do not hold, things will not work the way we think they are working.
It relies on other people liking you enough to give you their money. Studies have repeatedly and reliably proven that the halo effect is real, a person in a suit can earn more while begging than homeless people, which exploits prejudices and quick but biased decision making.
The reason I won’t give a person in a suit money but I will give a homeless one is because I have made that conscious choice apriori and engrained it in my subconscious. Most people don’t, and therefore see a “good guy” down on their luck and due to systemic pressure that has engraved into people’s heads that homeless people are lazy and filthy, they won’t.
Homeless exists only to keep people working and slaving away at the capitalist machine.
It’s a damn treatable problem one can solve.
For example, the money spent on healthcare for (frequent flier) homeless people can be used instead to house them properly and significantly reduce the cost to hospitals [1].
So no amount of “neighbourly help” can save that amount of money nor help as many people.
Targeted systemic changes can be vastly more efficient than relying on immutable factors (one’s appearance) and hoping that people are kind enough to help.
I am fairly certain that such cases can be found everywhere.
The cynic in me suggests that most people want to help their neighbour in order to feel good about themselves and see the impersonal nature of taxes as worthless or evil even because they themselves are oblivious to the consequences.
When I said “local neighbourhood”, I referred to one’s vicinity and where the individual can exert control. Not physical location.
[1] https://nlihc.org/resource/housing-homeless-hospital-patient...
The charity should be controlled by the people who put the money, you do not see the pattern? If they cheat they are risking losing the charity donations. This is not true of any taxing system.
> For example, the money spent on healthcare for (frequent flier) homeless people can be used instead to house them properly and significantly reduce the cost to hospitals
If there is research that this is the effective way to do it, what prevents a charity with enough incomings to do it that way? It must be the state? It can work like a private institution or a net of them.
> So no amount of “neighbourly help” can save that amount of money nor help as many people.
Taxing in Spain is higher and higher and evidence says that things are not getting better. If that was true, more taxes -> more welfare. Yet public positions that make no sense grow and "productive economy" is smashed with taxes.
> in order to feel good about themselves and see the impersonal nature of taxes as worthless or evil even because they themselves are oblivious to the consequences
Could be, that is you or me. A bureaucrat sees a mine of gold there, instead. :) You see the problem? And they have it in their hands to prioritize it however they like it. Do you think they will take a decision against them or that, in the face of choice, for example, if it is about them or others, what do you think they choose? You guessed right, them, because humans have incentives and interests. They will do more so if they do not pay the consequences, which is exactly what happens all the time. I have lots of examples of it that in a private or personal setup just do not happen just because you will pay the consequences directly.
There is no tax magic. Taxes are managed by humans with incentives. Careful with that. Same for private institutions that receive money. The difference is that for a private institution you turn back and go at the first suspicious move. With taxes you are literally captured, kidnapped by law, no matter what they do.
You are not addressing the problem there.
Don’t get me wrong, my taxes in Poland are absurdly high and my QoL is not that much higher compared to when I was in Denmark as a broke grad student barely making it through each month.
A bloated public sector is not evidence that collective assistance is bad, it is not. In the example I gave above, local information suggests to simply not help the homeless, but global information finds that housing them cuts the costs and improves the situation for everyone.
What prevents “a” charity from doing what I describe is that charities are run by people, and most of them are not effective, which is why effective altruism is a thing in the first place. The aim of effective altruism is to maximise the net impact of individual people’s charity by avoiding giving money to bad ones.
Still, EA does not have the capacity to see the complete picture because it still lacks data and can not organise large scale operations across multiple sectors whereas individual charities are very limited in scope.
This is more nuanced than you seem to suggest. It is for me evident that if collective assistance through coactive systems have a lot of the incentives shifted or reversed (you manage but do not suffer consequences, for example), then what will happen is that resources will not be used well and... it happens all the time! So for me this is clearly evidence.
> The aim of effective altruism is to maximise the net impact of individual people’s charity by avoiding giving money to bad ones
And the aim of communism is that we are all equal and everyone works for the good of all the others. Now tell me where you saw that. Even with the use of coaction was a failure... Intentions can be whatever you want, what counts is the results. A system where incentives are not aligned (as in compatible) with human nature are a recipe for failure.
It is of paramount importance that if there is research in the psychology field that says that if you collectivize responsibility noone takes care efficiently or just start to ignore the problems, then the logical step is to put more self-reliance and concrete reponsibles for things, to give just an example. Incentives must make sense or things do not work, that is what historic data taught us.
> Still, EA does not have the capacity to see the complete picture because it still lacks data and can not organise large scale operations across multiple sectors whereas individual charities are very limited in scope
I do not see the problem in gathering public information and adapting to the market needs. A state has to emit laws, is rigid, do giant budgets and moves slow. In the time a state moves, private companies do so several times faster.
Shetty hospitals example: did anyone try something like that before? No that I know of. Why? Because the incentive of the state is to justify tax paying and education and health care are two of their biggest justifications. If someone comes to show they are doing it wrong that talks very bad about states, indeed, and people will start to think it is a scam to pay a health care that is three or four times more expensive when they can have a similar one cheaper. At this time there is a big reason to move the state away from that sector unless they compete with the same rules.
Not sure what studies you are referring to but this strikes me as obviously untrue. The vast majority of charitable giving is to help people who aren't your neighbors.
People are more willing to help an single individual they know than a single stranger. They may also give more to stranger(s) in aggregate than people that they know, but there hey hell of a lot more strangers in the world than people you know.
for example, I would give a lot of time and money to help a sick family member, but I wouldn't give that to a single stranger.
I you want to talk about willingness to help individuals, I also think your numbers on charitable giving are incorrect. Charitable numbers are defined and biased to measure giving to strangers, as they look at tax deductable donations.
If you wanted to look at all financial help given, a more appropriate measure would be money given to strangers versus family. For the latter, you'd have to measure all the money parents spend on children and inheritance. I strongly suspect that people give their family spouses and children much more money over the course of their lives and at time of death.
This is where people usually object to strong utilitarian giving. Most people strongly react to the idea that they should spend more money on strangers than their children, because it would do more good for the strangers.
The strong utilitarian position is that the moral action would be to save lives in the third world instead of giving your kids birthday presents, paying for their schooling, or giving them your house when you die. From a certain perspective they are right. the problem is that utilitarians often make the good the enemy of the perfect. Sub optimal help still leads to a better world. doing good, but imperfectly is not immoral.
It is not this that is immoral. What is immoral is that a guy that has nothing to offer except extracting resources from the effort of others coactively decides where the money goes without you being involved in the process and paying no penalty for the bad decisions. This is not a good system. It is the worst possible system. It is much better to dive in your own money, literally and say "what am I doing with all this?" -> going to open a factory in the 3rd world and hire people. Because in this case there is mutual cooperation, something strong, solid, that will not break easily: people improve their lives, both sides benefit. This kind of state charity in a loop of we always need more for the poor is a failure, many times it does not solve the problem, and it creates an incentive to have poor people, needless to say some policies that perpetuate people receiving them there.
I always say that a social help is not a success, it is the reflect of a failure. The fewer we need, the better we are doing. But for that you need individuals with a minimal level of self-reliance and ambition.
I wasn't commenting on FTX, but utilitarian giving in general. I think there is room for thinking about effective altruism, but it shouldn't have a moral monopoly over giving. it makes sense for a narrow set of goals: (e.g. minimize global suffering), but that isn't the only thing people can or should care about
I also think it is pretty silly that people can't seems to separate FTX from effective altruism, and criticize each on their own merit.
I agree, I think effective altruism set up as a private operating thing could work, and if I ever have enough wealth, this is what I am going to operate. Needless to say that all the taxes I can save by doing that helps, at the end, taxes lower efficiency of any task: fewer resources available.
> minimize global suffering
Things like this, "save the planet", etc. are very problematic. It is impossible to agree on metrics. I think the best way is to let people innovate and deal with the aspects that are known to improve people's lives. For example, I would never open a charity to give food to people and let them go systematically. I do not think that improves people's lives. But I would be willing to open a place where they can study and have a job for people that are in risk of exclusion. That way you make autonomous people.
I really think self-reliance and responsibility is undervalued and that it is an active interest of governments not to help you, but to make you fall on a net of dependency on them so that you end up obeying. That is why we are receiving (Spain again, sorry) systematic attacks to property (higher taxes, renting policies, inheritance tax) and at the same time "social helps". Of course this is really bad and make people dependent.
I would say that there is no better person to manage a budget that the one that will pay a price for their mistakes, that is ourselves when it is ours. But if we do it wrong, we pay the price anyway for our mistakes. This means incentives are aligned.
In other setups the problem is that incentives are not aligned with what we want to achieve, you just have to believe in their good will. That setup is one I really dislike and taxing works basically like that. Even for public institutions that are injected money, when they would be bankrupt or they are not helping achieve their supposed goals they usually just raise taxes and inject more money. This would be seen as an abuse in normal civil life though state does it systematically.
Humans are herd animals. Each individual has a limited life, but together we build cultures that transcend millennia. That is what people refer to when they call on someone to leave the world better than they found it.
We should not accept for others to die of cancer where it is preventable, for example. But the effective way to achieve that is not for everyone to find a well paying day job and donate to cancer treatments for others. That's where the political undertones of EA leads them astray.
The more effective way is to build a society where cancer research and care in general is regarded as one of the more important things we do, and something to strive for. That it is something that should be given the resources it requires to achieve the goal, and that taking part of that is considered a fundamental right. That is where taxes come in. That doesn't mean taxes are good, or that it is necessarily the only way to implement such a system, only that it is the most effective method we have found.
Humanity can certainly eradicate malaria, for example, if the whole society decided it was the most important thing to do. The hard part is to nudge culture in that direction.
Why do you think that everyone taking personal responsibility to maximize the good they do is inferior to taxes and government directed good.
I believe the opposite.
Relying on the government is used as an excuse for personal inaction - essentially outsourcing altruism to 3rd party. People think, I shouldnt have to help anyone or do something as simple as pick up litter, because I already payed taxes for someone else to do that.
I would argue that it is better for people to work well paying jobs, take individual responsibility to support actions they believe have the most benefit.
The inverse is that people dont optimize income, pay the minimum tax, and have no individual control or responsibility over what it is spent on or how effectively it is.
The cancer treatment example was meant to show that culture is what matters in the long run, as the donation model is clearly less effective in this case.
Taxes are mere implementation. They follow, they do not lead. They are not relevant to the example.
However, you say a society where individuals choose to donate is not effective. (I would call this culture, and culturally driven progress).
You contrast it with a society where there is a general goal, and then claim taxes are the best way to achieve this. ( I would call this collectivism and government)
What reason do you have to think that centralized decision making and giving is more efficient than decentralized decision making and giving is.
I don't follow the distinction you are trying to draw. Why is one option culture focused and the other not?
My position is that the voluntary decentralized option is culture driven, and the compulsory option is not.
> Then one starts questioning, what is the real motivation behind the deed?
Does it really matter? Is someone donates $1M dollars to a charity and that money used effectively to save 100 lives in sub-saharan Africa (made up numbers....). does it matter whether the giver had some cynical objective? Do they people whose lives were saved care one way or another? Maybe it's just me but it strikes me as such a weird ethical view that we should withhold help from the most desperate people in the world on the off chance that the giver doesn't have "pure" motives.
Local Food pantries and soup kitchens are a great way to find a charity with a personal connection.
If you mine your personal connections you may find people you know or can get to know who are active in charitable activities abroad. I have several personal friends who run orphanages in third world countries.
I give in these ways because the personal connection allows me to hold the organizations accountable in some ways and the personal connections make the giving far more fulfilling.
I think perhaps that if you are trying to find a way to fund good across the world you delegate it to a large organization that makes it very difficult to know if there is any actual impact or you can look around you and find a more personal connection that can give you more confidence in the impact you provide. You are not in fact limited to the most visible charities.
This is what I mean. Orphans in third world countries are not your neighbors and the exact sorts of communities many EA charities are trying to help. It's just they want to ask the question "of all the orphanages in developing countries, which ones do the best job of improving the lives of the children under their care?".
> I think perhaps that if you are trying to find a way to fund good across the world you delegate it to a large organization that makes it very difficult to know if there is any actual impact or you can look around you and find a more personal connection that can give you more confidence in the impact you provide.
The whole point of EA is to create the accountability and visibility into the impact of these charities. The whole premise is that basically:
1. People in your local community may be struggling but there are almost certainly people much worse off in the developing world. Those people also suffer from problems that are so bad that you can make a huge difference in their lives with relatively (to us affluent westerners) small amount of money.
2. We should try and evaluate rigorously which charities are most effective at their stated goals and direct money there. Like measuring anything, it's difficult and uncertain but at least at the current margin we can still extract a lot of useful information this way.
And then there is a broader EA tenet which is that, if you are an affluent westerner, then you can almost certainly afford to give more money away to charitable causes. The reduction in your personal living standards will be minimal and you can make a massive difference for a lot of the world's most desperate people. And frankly a lot of the rest follows from that. Like if everyone in your community started giving 10% of their earnings to charity, is it really the case that the local food pantry would be able to use all of that money productively? Would any local charity be able to. At a certain level of giving you simply run out of opportunities to deploy the money locally and have to cast a wider net.
Your response could be well that's not really EA then to which the article would say "Yeah but to keep it from happening you sort of have to limit EA to "local" low profile giving.
I would posit that the level of giving where you run out of opportunities in your personal network that you can effectively give to is quite high. Far higher than most people.
A final thought is that "of all the orphanages in developing countries, which ones do the best job of improving the lives of the children under their care?" is perhaps a bad question to be asking. It assumes that you can even rank such a thing which I would posit you can't. Beyond do they feed, clothe, and educate as a minimum bar there is far more to the improving the lives of children. The quantifiable stuff does little and is relatively easy to accomplish. The rest is unquantifiable and has dramatic impacts on long term outcomes. If you want to know how effective the orphanage is you can't look at the balance sheet. You have to go visit it and get to know the people running it. And frankly if I'm giving my money to an orphanage the unquantifiable but in many ways most important elements are not something I am going to trust an organization of people to get correctly assess. It's inevitable that the organization will eventually lose sight of the mission.
Effective Altruism was founded to evade the two dynamics he describes (donors who do what their friends will admire them for not what helps poor strangers, and charities which spend most of their donations on themselves or on raising money). It sounds like part of it was hijacked by the Lesswrong / AI Risk crowd and by cryptocurrency swindlers.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150717034849/https://80000hour... h/t DonyChristie
[2]: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sam-bankman-fried-hi...
Yeah, it worths it.
In fact, it should be the very first thing to read about when you contemplate investing.
Why do websites have these "cute" labels these days? We have to beg the site to let us read what's written on it now?
Are they trying to plant ideas and emotions in our minds or something? "Let me read it first" implies I'm gonna decide later. I've already decided not to subscribe, reading the article won't change a thing. Where's the "don't bother me ever again" button?
Most people will bounce from pages. This encourages more people to stay and read.
If this cute label wasn't there most of us wouldn't want to read it, of those who do visit it we would scan the page, maybe scroll once, then bounce.
This annoyance is twofold. It makes the user invest something (the time, brain power needed to find the correct link) and the user will want to at least get something back from that investment. Secondly the "let me read it first" is a kind of suggestive NLPish language. It says to the user "I will read it before deciding", the "first" bit is important. We promise to hold off of some activity (deciding if its worth it) by reading more than we would normally. it's a trap.
The words "let me read it first" could be written as "I won't subscribe" or "Just let me read it" but these other two won't get as many views and time on the page.
It's not at all cute, it's manipulative and it actually appear to work.
I sincerely doubt that is the intention. A simpler explanation would be that they want just you to subscribe, so they nag you.
However, no user is going to subscribe (and go through the time costly action of giving their email to get a newsletter) to a blog where they haven't read it before, it's never going to happen. About 99% of users to that page will be first time visitors to the page.
edits: They could probably re-word the annoyance to state this and it would have the same effect.
Something like:
"we want to give a pause right here to ask you to read the page, as asking for this helps more people stay and read but first please think about whether you want to subscribe to our newsletter sometime in the future. By thinking about this, we've found that this helps more people to read this wonderful article. Thanks for your time!"
It sure as hell didn't encourage me. I closed the tab the second I saw it. If anything it encouraged me to come here talk about the manipulative nag screen because it's probably a more interesting topic than whatever the article is talking about. If they're putting a stupid screen dimming modal in front of the words, surely whatever they wrote can't be that important anyway.
body article.newsletter-post.post .subscribe-dialog,
body article.newsletter-post.post .subscribe-dialog-scroll-modal-scroll-capture { display: none !important; }
This is supposed to be what RSS was for, but it never really achieved the adoption required to let it be the sole solution for pushing updates to users. Ergo, email.
- Johann Heinrich PestalozziObviously, if someone says "I only want what's best for everyone", you shouldn't necessarily trust them. Especially if most of the people in their "everyone" live in some far off future.
But what's less obvious, but more important, is that you shouldn't even trust yourself when you say such things. Corruption isn't a property that comes with sociopaths moving in and gentrifying the place. Corruption starts at home. We do NOT always want what's best for everyone, if we're honest with ourselves. We want all sorts of things, be it penthouses in Bahamas or polycules, that probably aren't for the best of everyone involved (let alone everyone).
And you can't "correct" for it by, say, assigning a probability of self-deception, or creating some sort of market to estimate it (which is the sort of things EAs tend to reach for when met with fundamental criticism). You are only opening up more avenues for rationalization with such things. Your cleverness is not fully on your side in the fight to be honest with yourself.
I think if you put 300m people together who are this cynical about man’s wish to do good vs man’s wish to gain money and status, and let them run a country, you get the US of A.
One day I hope that even an American manages to Do Some Good without being shot down by the local regressive left for not Doing Good Enough and simultaneously by the libertarian right for just doing it for status and book sales.
Effective altruism has issues, but you won't read anything interesting about them here.