Effective Altruist Writing Is Impactful: Here's What To Do About That

Crosspost. 

There’s a common pessimistic view according to which persuasion on important topics is almost impossible. This is backwards. Persuading people on high-stakes topics is amazingly impactful and underdone.

Now, it’s certainly true that any individual article won’t change the minds of most people. But how could it be otherwise? If most articles convinced most people, then readers would constantly be buffeted around by whatever they last read—one day a Catholic, the next a radical vegan, the next an atheist.

Most of the biggest ideas I believe today came to me through some singular article or video. I first encountered effective altruism through a TED Talk, wild animal suffering through an article, and animal welfare because of Alex O'Connor’s video. I wasn’t immediately convinced. But these pieces introduced me to the central ideas that I came to see were correct, after I reflected more.

When Scott Alexander wrote a post arguing that people should pledge to give away 10% of their lifetime earnings, he was able to get 60 people to take the pledge. That probably saved about 120 lives. About 30 people who have taken the pledge mentioned my posts, which probably saved about 60 lives.

I am not Scott Alexander. I don’t have his amazing ability to write six hundred pages filled with subtle Kabbalistic analysis. My blogging approach has generally been “write things that I think are true, in ways that are clear, and give solid arguments for them.” Scott Alexander is some kind of weird blogging witch—I am not a witch. I’m you.

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But by writing a bunch of articles about EA topics, I’ve been able to raise enough money to save hundreds of lives and help billions of shrimp. When some bloggers got together and did a shrimp fundraiser, we were able to raise $137,000 for the Shrimp Welfare Project—enough to spare about 2 billion shrimp.

A recent survey of my readers revealed that:

• 29% said my articles had convinced them to donate somewhere they wouldn’t have donated to otherwise. In many cases, this was just a few dollars given once—but in just as many cases, people set up monthly donations to highly effective charities. Some people said it was counterfactually responsible for them giving thousands of dollars to FarmKind.
• 7.8% said the blog was responsible for them taking a different career or doing some other high-impact project that they wouldn't have otherwise done.
• 66.1% said I’d changed their mind on some topic.
• 7.5% said the blog was responsible for them taking the Giving What We Can pledge. If the real number is even 1%, then this would make the blog counterfactually responsible for 100 pledges and about 200 lives saved.
• 35% said the blog contributed to them going vegan, vegetarian, or being some kind of reducetarian.

I don’t think I’m particularly special in this regard. I’m not an especially naturally skilled writer (just look at my earliest blog posts). If you write true things reasonably clearly, you can probably have a pretty big impact. If you have a blog with 100 subscribers, and convince one of them to take the pledge, that’s about as much counterfactual impact as giving away $10,000.

A bunch of young interesting EA writers have started substacks: Amos Wollen, Silas Abrahamsen, Glenn, Value Locked In, and Irrational Community. My guess is that on average each person who has done this has gotten lots of money donated to effective charities. This is an insane fact about our world. By starting a blog on the internet and posting regularly, you can save a bunch of people’s lives, in expectation.

This has some big implications.

First, if you are thinking about starting a blog, do it. Maybe, probably it will go nowhere. But even if it remains pretty small, you might just save someone’s life, or spare a bunch of sentient beings from extreme suffering. Blasting important ideas into the ether is really impactful. The only situation in which I’d recommend against this is if there’s some other super impactful thing that it would compete with. But if you’re a student or an academic, start writing on the internet about important topics!

Probably you should do this even if you haven’t given much thought to blogging before. Before I started blogging, I didn’t think of myself as a writer. I didn’t even like writing much. I just started it on a whim because Michael Huemer had some objections to utilitarianism that I thought were wrong!

Second, if you have a blog, make sure to write about important topics. It’s easy to get lost in trying to be novel and only focus on cool intellectual topics. But you should try to regularly say things that are important, even if they’re not that novel. It isn’t a brilliant insight that you should give away your income to effective charities, but if you write that down in an article, and send it out to your readers, you might save a bunch of lives. When writing a post, have in the back of your mind the question: if I convinced every one of my readers that what I was saying was true, would this make the world better?

A number of pretty influential writers read this blog. If any of you people are reading this article, I am speaking to you: please write a post arguing that people should give money to effective charities. Suggest explicitly that they take the Giving What We Can Pledge, and explain what it is. Mention some specific highly-effective charities. Remember: when Scott Alexander did this, he prevented around 120 deaths! You can prevent large numbers of deaths too, just by writing an article.

Even if you already said something vaguely similar in 2018 or whatever, say it again. You should try to write reasonably frequently about impactful subjects. Maybe a few people will find it somewhat repetitive, but other people will hear it for the first time, and take the pledge, and extra children will not die! My sense is that basically every big writer writes way too infrequently about impactful subjects.

Return to the classic drowning child experiment. If a bunch of children were drowning in far-away ponds, and the only way to save them was to publish a blog post suggesting that people nearby pull them out of ponds, then obviously you should publish that blog post! This would be true even if you published a vaguely similar blogpost a bunch of years ago that some of them have read. On top of this, write about high impact careers!

Third, if you start writing, and your articles are good, don’t stop! A common failure mode is people start blogs, they go pretty far, and then they sort of run out of ideas and peter out (cough Connor Jennings cough). Now, in some cases this is because they start working on other important things (e.g. I hear Glenn is out saving the world, so he has an excuse). But The Droll Scroll and Amos Wollen—you are without excuse, sorry. You were both gifted with supernatural writing powers and should use them for good!¹

Fourth, even if you are not a blogger, but instead a member of the hoi polloi, try to share articles on important topics with other people. Restack them, share them with friends and family, etc. It is very easy to hit the restack button when you come across important articles on EA topics—doing so enables these articles to get a wider reach.

Fifth, I think it’s plausible that becoming a paid subscriber for high impact EA blogs is pretty impactful. Now, obviously this is very self-serving, so you have some reason to be suspicious. But having more paid subscribers helps a blog do better in the subtack rankings, thus potentially moving large amounts of money to effective charities. It wouldn’t surprise me if one of the better things you can do with a few dollars a month is becoming a paid subscriber to Silas Abrahamsen’s blog, for example, or Amos Wollen’s (especially on the off chance it would rouse him from his slumber).

Sixth, if you start a blog, try to ensure it isn’t just read by EAs! While you should sometimes write about the most important topics, you shouldn’t only write about the most important topics. If I only talked about shrimp, that wouldn’t even be good for the shrimp. Ideally you want to make EA ideas more salient among non-EAs.

Do other things to make sure your blog gets more exposure. For example, I just got Twitter premium and started cross-posting my articles on Twitter. My guess is that more people should do things like that. If doing that for every single article gets one extra person to take the pledge, it will have much more than paid off.

A common blog failure mode is getting nerd-sniped by interesting topics that no one else cares about. Now, I’m not above this, as my fifty billion articles about subtleties in anthropic reasoning attest. But writing about topics that are neither important nor interesting to most people should be thought of as akin to drinking: fine in moderation, objectionable in excess. That is, unless you are Scott Alexander, and you can write an engaging piece about literally anything.

There are real and significant problems in the world. Much can be done about them. It is easy to get lost investigating cool puzzles that no one cares about. But you should know that doing so trades off against convincing people of what matters most.