Good idea. Indeed, doesn't taking the Life You Can Save pledge seems like a pretty good candidate for a High ask?

It does seem to be a large and in that respect ill chosen ask and conversion target. I wouldn't be surprised if finding 50 mailing lists yields no one who gets convinced to donate 10% of their lifetime income as a result of getting some emails. At best it might find some more people who are already on track to do something similar, and there has been value to having their numbers listed publicly on the Giving What We Can website, but it's less than that of saving 20 lives.

Have you thought of choosing a different conversion target? Even keeping to % pledges (which charities wouldn't conventionally consider a good ask), The Life You Can Save pledge seems a better pick. Did you consider this alongside the Giving What We Can one, and if so why did you pick Giving What We Can?

(I ought to add that you may have talked about saving 20 lives as standard marketing hyperbole to get people excited, which would be fine! In that case I apologize if I've doused that excitement with cold water - treat this as a somewhat separate academic discussion.)

Or indeed many times less than 0.1% - it seems like you have a quite good sense of what the conversion rate is pegged to be, but don't some people think vegan-creation leafleting can healthily be treated as not working for practical purposes?

It's possible for two groups to be casually necessary for something to happen, and in that case, both are 100% responsible for causing the event.

e.g. I tell the hitman where the target is; the hitman shoots the target. The target wouldn't have died if either of us had failed, so we both 100% caused the person to die.

e.g. 2. I think it's true that if Will and Toby never existed, I would have never done any EA stuff, so firstly they do get the "credit" in some sense, secondly both may have been casually necessary.

But then also note:

1) "causes" doesn't equal "gets the credit for" in the usual sense of "credit".

2) In real life situations, it's usually true that if one person didn't persuade X of something, then someone else would have persuaded them later. Once you properly think through the counterfactuals and uncertainties, it's rarely true that one person 100% caused anything. So if you "recruit" an EA, you don't probably cause all of their impact. It's probably better to model it as a speed-up like you suggest.

I'm not sure assigning credit is a good way to think about this. Instead there are just decisions you can make, and you want to make the ones that most improve the world?

Peter Buckley attempted to hire some virtual assistants from ODesk. They were way too slow. My guess would be that EAs have a much better sense of what types of groups to look for and where to find them. The task also requires a decent amount of research, which is a comparative advantage of many EAs.

Would love to get tons of VAs on this though if you can think of a better way to use them.

Mass-scraping is great when you've already identified the webpages to scrap from. Identifying these webpages, however, is half the battle. (We've already combined THINK's list with ours, but thanks for the heads up!)

If you know someone at SER, I'd love to chat with them about what their strategy was.

What did THINK do exactly, and how did it go? Are they still doing it?