"Our data shows that a founder who starts now and runs a charity for three years will outperform (at running a charity) someone who does two years work experience in a consultancy and then starts running a charity for a year. In short, start early and learn the most applicable things as you go along." 

I'd be super interested in seeing the detailed data here if possible!

Order the recent TIME Magazine issue about effective altruism 

If you're in the US or Canada, you can order a copy of the recent TIME Magazine issue about effective altruism with the link here!

This is from  a couple months ago: in large part due to the advocacy of New York kidney donors in the EA community, this bill passed the NY state assembly, which will reimburse kidney donors and may save around 100 lives a year. It still needs to be signed into law by the governor, but it's very likely to, and EAs are already on the ball to lobby for its passing! 

Jumping in here — Will is doing a couple events which involved large purchases for attendees, and several university groups also made large orders for Fall 2022 reading groups back in the early summer, when we were driving early sales to ensure the publisher would do a large enough first print of the book. This played an important role in the book not selling out or running low on copies early on (as Superintelligence did, which caused shipping delays on launch day), as reprints can take over a month and the publisher’s original plan was to print as many c... (read more)

Hi Tae, thank you so much for writing this post! I’m coordinating WWOTF ads and this is really helpful feedback to get. We’ve thought a lot about the trade-off between reaching potentially interested audiences while not oversaturating those audiences in a way that’s off-putting, and have taken many steps to avoid doing so (most importantly, by not narrowing our target audience so greatly that the same people get bombarded). Ensuring we don’t oversaturate audiences is a key priority. 

If it’s alright, I’d love to hear more details about exactly which ad... (read more)

This is very exciting!!  Best of luck with your launch!

Thanks  Pablo and Aris!

Currently we don't have plans to do a WWOTF-specific reading group syllabus in time for the start of school, but I'd be excited about possibly working with you on one if you're interested — let's continue over email :) 

Awesome work, and best of luck!!

Yes it has!! 🎉 Thank you to all who contacted their assembly-member :) 

It still needs to be signed into law by Governor Hochul — I'll likely make another post soon about how to email her office to increase the likelihood of that happening. 

25% off What We Owe The Future on Barnes and Noble through April 22! 

Hey all, if you use the discount code PREORDER25 on Barnes and Noble before April 22, you will get 25% off What We Owe The Future. The link is below: 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/what-we-owe-the-future-william-macaskill/1140658116?ean=9781541618626

They do not count for the NYT bestseller list, but they do count for your respective national bestseller list

The price is set by the publisher, so for now there's nothing we can do directly reduce the price of the book on Amazon, etc. (In the future, an EA publishing house could make sure EA books are priced more accessibly! See Fin Moorhouse's post here) 

In the coming months, we'll likely partner with bookstores to do pre-order discounts (eg. 25% off), and EA groups can use funding to purchase copies of the book for their members. So if pre-ordering now is price prohibitive, there will be other opportunities later on to pre-order. 

Yes, it will!

Yes, the covers are final

A quick note about the use of "bad faith criticisms" — I don't think it's the case that every argument against "taking money from internet billionaires" is bad faith, where bad faith is defined as falsely presenting one's motives, consciously using poor evidence or reasoning, or some other intentional duplicitousness.

 It seems perfectly possible for one to coherently and in good faith argue that EA should not take money from billionaires. Perhaps in practice you find such high-quality good faith takes lacking, but in any case I think it's important not to categorically dismiss them as bad faith. 

Yes, it will once launched! (Will is doing the audiobook) 

Not for now! It's valuable to have pre-orders a different booksellers, and we think the distribution of where people naturally end up ordering from is likely to be optimal. 

Ah, thank you for pointing out the outdated e-book link! (Just edited to remove.) The bestseller list switched from having just e-books as a category to a combined print and e-books category, as you describe. It's still advantageous to order the hardcover since this list is given more attention for new books, and it is more difficult to hit the combined print  and e-book list, since it involves competing with more books. 

Thanks, Garrison!

My understanding is that hardcover and e-book sales are counted for different categories of The New York Times Bestsellers List. (There are several categories for non-fiction: hardcover, paperback, e-book, and combined print and e-book.) 

Reaching the hardcover bestseller list tends to get more attention for new releases than the e-book bestseller list, so it's a more valuable list to be on. 

Very excited that this is getting off the ground!! :) 

Thanks, Teddy! Excited to read more of your work! 

+1! 

Thank you, this is amazing work! This will be very helpful to share with our intro fellows who are interested in internships this summer.