I’m sorry, but this is just the sort of reach that is silly and unproductive in my view.
I conceded giving to charities is much more useful than traditional gifts in a utilitarian sense (duh), but this has nothing to do with romance. (Unless you define romance way outside the norm. If so, fine. But don’t expect anyone else to pay the slightest attention.)
I mean, let’s just go all the way here: Instead of weddings, we could have a big fundraiser; Instead of making out, we should research charities together online. These choices are of superior utility, therefore they are romantic!
There is a point where pushing rationality (and that’s what Gleb is doing, from my understanding) in extreme ways is irrational, because people think it’s super weird. The current system of everyone giving everyone else gifts for every friggin holiday on the calendar is, I agree, irrational. (My family give charitable donations as part of our Christmas gifts). But, at some point, it can be taken too far and people tune you out.
Judging by the fact that this post got 500 FB likes the first day it was posted on The Life You Can Save Blog, people are not tuning it out. Note, the baseline for posts on TLYCS blog is about 100-200 likes over their lifetime, not the first day.
Reading through the Intentional Insights fb page [1] it looks to me like you’re using paid likes? The “people” who liked those posts all look like fake accounts. While I can’t see the specific accounts that ‘liked’ your TLYCS post, is that what you did there too? If so getting 500 fb likes doesn’t tell us that it was unusually good.
These all look fake to me, but let’s look at the last one because it’s the weirdest. The most recent 19 posts are all re-shares of Intentional Insights posts or posts elsewhere by Gleb. Looking at the fb pages they “like” I see:
AlterNet (News/Media Website)
Nigerian Movies (Local Business)
Poise Hair Collection (Health/Beauty)
Bold F.aces (Public Figure)
Get Auto Loan (Automobiles and Parts)
Closeup (Product/Service)
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky (Writer)
Hero Lager (Food/Beverages)
EBook Korner Kafé (Book)
Intentional Insights (Non-Profit Organization)
Additionally, looking through the people who like typical Intentional Insights posts, they’re from a wide range of third world countries, with (as far as I can see) no one from richer countries. This also points to paid likes, since poor-country likes are cheaper than rich-country ones, and being popular only in third world countries doesn’t seem likely from your writing.
Is there some other explanation for this pattern? “Paid likes” is the only thing that seems plausible to me.
They are not fake in the sense of fake people—Gleb runs meatpuppets, err… paid virtual assistants. These are real people, it’s just that they are employed by InIn and their job is social media promotion which means they are paid to retweet, like, upvote. See e.g. this comment and the follow-up.
This also points to paid likes, since poor-country likes are cheaper than rich-country ones, and being popular only in third world countries doesn’t seem likely from your writing.
Why don’t you think there are reasons that Intentional Insights might be more popular in poor-countries?
Do you think you have a good idea what kind of content an Bangladeshi atheist wants to read?
The likely do have practical concerns but they also want tribal belonging. InIn might be able to provide an answer on the level of tribal belonging that they like.
Thanks for explaining your claims, and the evidence that led to it.
Let’s take Sargin indeed as an example. He’s someone who has read Intentional Insights content for a while, and has been getting into rationality and effective altruism as a result. He offered to volunteer for the organization, and has proved a good volunteer. We then brought him on as a part-time contractor. We have several people like him, who volunteer 2/3rds of their time, and work for 1⁄3 of their time.
InIn social media and our website are targeted to all people around the world. Our website gets about 12K hits per month, with the following countries being the top 5 in the last month: US, India, Phillipines, Malaysia, Indonesia. Our FB page is “liked” mostly by people in developing countries as well.
Why is this? Partially because of how our advertising works. We follow the “drowning child” model of advertising—we don’t place higher value on people in rich countries than in poorer countries when we promote content, as we believe our content can help people around the world. So when we boost a post on FB, we boost it in the most cost-effective means possible, which means it gets delivered mostly to the countries where the clicks are cheapest, namely India, Phillipines, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. They then have the option of clicking “like” on the post and “liking” the FB page, if they wish.
While we boost posts on FB, we don’t boost posts on Twitter or Pinterest, as we don’t have the skills within the organization to do so. So you can see the difference in our followers on Twitter, of whom we have around 11K or so—most are not from developing countries, and the same is true of our 4.5K followers on Pinterest.
This is highly different from buying likes, namely specifically paying people to like the page or posts. Doing so doesn’t build community or engagement, which is the point of social media, and would not align with the Intentional Insights mission of spreading rational thinking and effective altruism broadly. Since that’s the goal of InIn, it really doesn’t make sense for us to do so.
We only do what advances our mission, even if some folks here might disagree with our methods or goals—orienting toward asking what advances our mission and working backward from that might help you model us better :-)
P. S. For anyone wanting to help us update, the best way to convince us to do so is to show how what we’re doing is not advancing the mission of promoting rational thinking and effective altruist ideas broadly.
You seem to believe your statement about Sargin contradicts mine. Please explain how iit does so.
Your likes come from people you pay money to.
Your statement makes it sound like a claim that most of our likes comes from those we paid money to. I hope you see from the description above that is clearly not the case :-)
You seem to believe your statement about Sargin contradicts mine.
You are mistaken. I believe my statement about Sargin Rukevwe (you’re employing his relatives as well, I think) expands on your statement. As to contradiction, well, I have strong doubts about him getting into effective altruism…
Your statement makes it sound like a claim that most of our likes comes from those we paid money to.
I don’t know about most of your likes and I suspect that varies. But your statement makes it sound like your likes do not come from people you pay to like the posts. In fact some of them do.
Isn’t it interesting how the list of people jkaufman compiled from just looking at who likes your Facebook posts looks very much like the list of people you pay money to?
A post like “Trump Feels Your Anger and Anxiety: How Neuroscience Helps Explain Trump’s Triumphs” has 242 likes on the InIn facebook page. If five of those are people that Gleb pays money to that’s doesn’t really matter. That also wouldn’t be the main concern that jkaufman talks about.
Those 242 likes come from what I sampled from places like Bangladesh and Indonesia. jkaufman charges that those are mostly paid likes.
Isn’t it interesting how the list of people jkaufman compiled from just looking at who likes your Facebook posts looks very much like the list of people you pay money to?
If Gleb only pays money to those five people and not to the 237 other people who liked the post then, a huge part of jkaufman charge isn’t correct.
I think we’re on slightly different semantic grounds here. “Paid likes” is a specific practice, one that we’ve never engaged in, because it’s highly counterproductive to creating an engaged FB community.
Now, are there people we pay who also like our FB posts? Sure. They are the ones who most consistently like them. This is one reason we hired them to work for us. It’s a pretty typical thing to do for a nonprofit to hire on volunteers who are passionate about the cause.
getting into effective altruism
I accept that you’re skeptical. Here’s an example of one of our virtual assistants describing his getting into EA.
It’s a pretty typical thing to do for a nonprofit to hire on volunteers who are passionate about the cause.
Yes, but that is not what you are doing. You are not hiring especially passionate volunteers. You’re hiring cheap third-world virtual assistants who repost, like, and generally promote your posts for money, not because they are especially fond of InIn.
describing his getting into EA
Don’t see anything about EA in there. Charity work, yes, EA, no.
It doesn’t look like a silly question; steelmanned to some degree it would be “do you have any evidence of this, because if that was true, I’d want to end that practice in my organization”. I prefer systems where burden of proof is on the accuser, and whilst you don’t need payslips that have as job title “content upvoter”, some explanation would be nice.
It’s perfectly possible to speak the truth whilst being intellectually dishonest, you two could be arguing past each other—“You’re engaging in shady business practices!” “There’s no fraud here.”
“Paid likes” is a specific practice, one that we’ve never engaged in
Sorry, yes, you’re interpreting my use of “paid likes” as being a very specific thing, and I mean it differently. Specifically, I’m talking about accounts that (a) click like and (b) are operated by someone who received money from InIn and (c) wouldn’t have done (a) without (b).
Ah, I see there was a miscommunication. In that case, sure, there are people who are paid for social media management, and as part of doing so, click like on our posts. Yes, I suppose they would not be doing so as consistently as they are if they were not paid, although someone who was let go due to financial constraints still keeps liking our posts consistently due to his enthusiasm for the content.
They are the ones who most consistently like them. This is one reason we hired them to work for us.
You’re saying that first they start liking all of your posts, then you reach out to them, and in many cases decide to hire them? The hiring doesn’t come before the mass-liking?
Not necessarily. Sometimes they expressed enthusiasm in ways other than liking our posts, such as sending me private emails and expressing a desire to volunteer, etc. We only take on as contractors people who are passionate about the cause, have benefited personally from the content, and volunteer at least 2⁄3 of their time or more.
It would seem that the existence of such contractors follows logically from the fact that you are able to hire people despite the fact that you require contractors to volunteer 2⁄3 of their time.
The issue at hand is motivation, not existence. Lumifer fails to understand that people would not work at 1⁄3 of the standard rate if they were not passionate about the cause.
They are hired at 1⁄3 the standard third-world rate, silly. They can make much more working for another organization—they choose to work for Intentional Insights because of their passion for it. But anyway, I’m tired of this. I think I have explained the situation clearly enough for any rational being to update. If you refuse to be rational about it, I’m not going to waste my time on this anymore.
They are hired at 1⁄3 the standard third-world rate, silly.
The standard third-world rate is “whatever I can get”, love.
they choose to work for Intentional Insights because of their passion for it
LOL. Y’know, you inflict a lot of damage to yourself and your brand just because you stubbornly insist on your petty lies and keep on digging when the correct (dare I say rational? X-D) choice of action is to cut and run...
The standard third-world rate is “whatever I can get”
I love that you keep showing your ignorance throughout this conversation. Gold star for this one, especially. See the minimum rate for Upwork if you’re curious about this. Consider this comment an extra favor to help you learn.
Not going to dignify the rest of your silly commentary with answers. Oh, and BTW, thanks for drawing more attention to Intentional Insights with your commentary. People love controversy, and this is one reason I enjoy engaging with your until you start being repetitive and unimaginative, like you’re being right now. Ta-ta!
We pay several people to do social media management of InIn’s accounts :-) This is highly different from buying likes themselves. See my response to jkaufman here.
I’m not sure that’s terribly compelling evidence of anything. A post like yours is an applause light for that crowd.
Anyway, I think my main beef is the article trying to push this as “romantic”. Typical mind fallacy is a thing, so maybe it’s just different strokes, but I’ve never met a woman who would find this even marginally romantic, by any definition I’m aware of.
As for the general idea of eschewing gift exchanges in favor of donations: Love it. It just seems your trying too hard to pretend it’s specifically “romantic”, and that feels weird to me.
No doubt the audience is different. I was responding to the point about people tuning it out because it’s pushing rationality in extreme ways and thus people thinking it’s super-weird.
I’m sorry, but this is just the sort of reach that is silly and unproductive in my view.
I conceded giving to charities is much more useful than traditional gifts in a utilitarian sense (duh), but this has nothing to do with romance. (Unless you define romance way outside the norm. If so, fine. But don’t expect anyone else to pay the slightest attention.)
I mean, let’s just go all the way here: Instead of weddings, we could have a big fundraiser; Instead of making out, we should research charities together online. These choices are of superior utility, therefore they are romantic!
There is a point where pushing rationality (and that’s what Gleb is doing, from my understanding) in extreme ways is irrational, because people think it’s super weird. The current system of everyone giving everyone else gifts for every friggin holiday on the calendar is, I agree, irrational. (My family give charitable donations as part of our Christmas gifts). But, at some point, it can be taken too far and people tune you out.
Judging by the fact that this post got 500 FB likes the first day it was posted on The Life You Can Save Blog, people are not tuning it out. Note, the baseline for posts on TLYCS blog is about 100-200 likes over their lifetime, not the first day.
Reading through the Intentional Insights fb page [1] it looks to me like you’re using paid likes? The “people” who liked those posts all look like fake accounts. While I can’t see the specific accounts that ‘liked’ your TLYCS post, is that what you did there too? If so getting 500 fb likes doesn’t tell us that it was unusually good.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/intentionalinsights/
We at Intentional Insights don’t do paid likes, it wouldn’t be very beneficial for building a community to do so. Neither does TLYCS.
I agree that it’s not beneficial for community building, but here’s what makes me think you have paid “followers”:
Looking back over the past 12 posts on Intentional Insights, I see the following accounts consistently liking your posts:
Candice Bacolod Olivar
Jojo Olivar
Oghenevowhero Beatrice Sargin
Maw Arenas
Sargin Paul
These all look fake to me, but let’s look at the last one because it’s the weirdest. The most recent 19 posts are all re-shares of Intentional Insights posts or posts elsewhere by Gleb. Looking at the fb pages they “like” I see:
AlterNet (News/Media Website)
Nigerian Movies (Local Business)
Poise Hair Collection (Health/Beauty)
Bold F.aces (Public Figure)
Get Auto Loan (Automobiles and Parts)
Closeup (Product/Service)
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky (Writer)
Hero Lager (Food/Beverages)
EBook Korner Kafé (Book)
Intentional Insights (Non-Profit Organization)
Additionally, looking through the people who like typical Intentional Insights posts, they’re from a wide range of third world countries, with (as far as I can see) no one from richer countries. This also points to paid likes, since poor-country likes are cheaper than rich-country ones, and being popular only in third world countries doesn’t seem likely from your writing.
Is there some other explanation for this pattern? “Paid likes” is the only thing that seems plausible to me.
They are not fake in the sense of fake people—Gleb runs meatpuppets, err… paid virtual assistants. These are real people, it’s just that they are employed by InIn and their job is social media promotion which means they are paid to retweet, like, upvote. See e.g. this comment and the follow-up.
Why don’t you think there are reasons that Intentional Insights might be more popular in poor-countries? Do you think you have a good idea what kind of content an Bangladeshi atheist wants to read?
I would guess they want to read about operational security and how to run away from a mob intent on hacking them to pieces.
The likely do have practical concerns but they also want tribal belonging. InIn might be able to provide an answer on the level of tribal belonging that they like.
Thanks for explaining your claims, and the evidence that led to it.
Let’s take Sargin indeed as an example. He’s someone who has read Intentional Insights content for a while, and has been getting into rationality and effective altruism as a result. He offered to volunteer for the organization, and has proved a good volunteer. We then brought him on as a part-time contractor. We have several people like him, who volunteer 2/3rds of their time, and work for 1⁄3 of their time.
InIn social media and our website are targeted to all people around the world. Our website gets about 12K hits per month, with the following countries being the top 5 in the last month: US, India, Phillipines, Malaysia, Indonesia. Our FB page is “liked” mostly by people in developing countries as well.
Why is this? Partially because of how our advertising works. We follow the “drowning child” model of advertising—we don’t place higher value on people in rich countries than in poorer countries when we promote content, as we believe our content can help people around the world. So when we boost a post on FB, we boost it in the most cost-effective means possible, which means it gets delivered mostly to the countries where the clicks are cheapest, namely India, Phillipines, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. They then have the option of clicking “like” on the post and “liking” the FB page, if they wish.
While we boost posts on FB, we don’t boost posts on Twitter or Pinterest, as we don’t have the skills within the organization to do so. So you can see the difference in our followers on Twitter, of whom we have around 11K or so—most are not from developing countries, and the same is true of our 4.5K followers on Pinterest.
This is highly different from buying likes, namely specifically paying people to like the page or posts. Doing so doesn’t build community or engagement, which is the point of social media, and would not align with the Intentional Insights mission of spreading rational thinking and effective altruism broadly. Since that’s the goal of InIn, it really doesn’t make sense for us to do so.
We only do what advances our mission, even if some folks here might disagree with our methods or goals—orienting toward asking what advances our mission and working backward from that might help you model us better :-)
P. S. For anyone wanting to help us update, the best way to convince us to do so is to show how what we’re doing is not advancing the mission of promoting rational thinking and effective altruist ideas broadly.
Let’s. He is an, ahem, professional virtual assistant. Here is his Google+ page. Notice that it consists entirely of InIn reposts.
That is what you do. Your likes come from people you pay money to.
You seem to believe your statement about Sargin contradicts mine. Please explain how iit does so.
Your statement makes it sound like a claim that most of our likes comes from those we paid money to. I hope you see from the description above that is clearly not the case :-)
You are mistaken. I believe my statement about Sargin Rukevwe (you’re employing his relatives as well, I think) expands on your statement. As to contradiction, well, I have strong doubts about him getting into effective altruism…
I don’t know about most of your likes and I suspect that varies. But your statement makes it sound like your likes do not come from people you pay to like the posts. In fact some of them do.
Isn’t it interesting how the list of people jkaufman compiled from just looking at who likes your Facebook posts looks very much like the list of people you pay money to?
A post like “Trump Feels Your Anger and Anxiety: How Neuroscience Helps Explain Trump’s Triumphs” has 242 likes on the InIn facebook page. If five of those are people that Gleb pays money to that’s doesn’t really matter. That also wouldn’t be the main concern that jkaufman talks about.
Those 242 likes come from what I sampled from places like Bangladesh and Indonesia. jkaufman charges that those are mostly paid likes.
If Gleb only pays money to those five people and not to the 237 other people who liked the post then, a huge part of jkaufman charge isn’t correct.
I think we’re on slightly different semantic grounds here. “Paid likes” is a specific practice, one that we’ve never engaged in, because it’s highly counterproductive to creating an engaged FB community.
Now, are there people we pay who also like our FB posts? Sure. They are the ones who most consistently like them. This is one reason we hired them to work for us. It’s a pretty typical thing to do for a nonprofit to hire on volunteers who are passionate about the cause.
I accept that you’re skeptical. Here’s an example of one of our virtual assistants describing his getting into EA.
Yes, but that is not what you are doing. You are not hiring especially passionate volunteers. You’re hiring cheap third-world virtual assistants who repost, like, and generally promote your posts for money, not because they are especially fond of InIn.
Don’t see anything about EA in there. Charity work, yes, EA, no.
Evidence?
Don’t be daft.
It doesn’t look like a silly question; steelmanned to some degree it would be “do you have any evidence of this, because if that was true, I’d want to end that practice in my organization”. I prefer systems where burden of proof is on the accuser, and whilst you don’t need payslips that have as job title “content upvoter”, some explanation would be nice.
It’s perfectly possible to speak the truth whilst being intellectually dishonest, you two could be arguing past each other—“You’re engaging in shady business practices!” “There’s no fraud here.”
Nope, because InIn is basically Gleb and his wife, that’s it, and he, of course, knows perfectly well how “that practice” works.
In any case, we’ve already circled around this mulberry bush. See e.g. starting from here and reading the replies, or follow the links upthread.
It is certainly possible to be dishonest while speaking the literal truth. However that’s not called “arguing past each other”, that’s called deceit.
That is one well-plucked mulberry bush.
Sorry, yes, you’re interpreting my use of “paid likes” as being a very specific thing, and I mean it differently. Specifically, I’m talking about accounts that (a) click like and (b) are operated by someone who received money from InIn and (c) wouldn’t have done (a) without (b).
Ah, I see there was a miscommunication. In that case, sure, there are people who are paid for social media management, and as part of doing so, click like on our posts. Yes, I suppose they would not be doing so as consistently as they are if they were not paid, although someone who was let go due to financial constraints still keeps liking our posts consistently due to his enthusiasm for the content.
You’re saying that first they start liking all of your posts, then you reach out to them, and in many cases decide to hire them? The hiring doesn’t come before the mass-liking?
Not necessarily. Sometimes they expressed enthusiasm in ways other than liking our posts, such as sending me private emails and expressing a desire to volunteer, etc. We only take on as contractors people who are passionate about the cause, have benefited personally from the content, and volunteer at least 2⁄3 of their time or more.
*snort*
Let’s translate: “We pay our contractors at most 1⁄3 of the stated rate”.
You are being silly. What makes you believe any contractor would work for 1⁄3 the standard rate?
It would seem that the existence of such contractors follows logically from the fact that you are able to hire people despite the fact that you require contractors to volunteer 2⁄3 of their time.
The issue at hand is motivation, not existence. Lumifer fails to understand that people would not work at 1⁄3 of the standard rate if they were not passionate about the cause.
That’s why you hire third-world virtual assistants.
They are hired at 1⁄3 the standard third-world rate, silly. They can make much more working for another organization—they choose to work for Intentional Insights because of their passion for it. But anyway, I’m tired of this. I think I have explained the situation clearly enough for any rational being to update. If you refuse to be rational about it, I’m not going to waste my time on this anymore.
The standard third-world rate is “whatever I can get”, love.
LOL. Y’know, you inflict a lot of damage to yourself and your brand just because you stubbornly insist on your petty lies and keep on digging when the correct (dare I say rational? X-D) choice of action is to cut and run...
I love that you keep showing your ignorance throughout this conversation. Gold star for this one, especially. See the minimum rate for Upwork if you’re curious about this. Consider this comment an extra favor to help you learn.
Not going to dignify the rest of your silly commentary with answers. Oh, and BTW, thanks for drawing more attention to Intentional Insights with your commentary. People love controversy, and this is one reason I enjoy engaging with your until you start being repetitive and unimaginative, like you’re being right now. Ta-ta!
Oh, you think Upwork is the only way to hire third-world virtual assistants. Well, grasshopper… :-)
But thanks for that piece of information, it clarified why are you paying 1⁄3 of stated rates.
We aim to please :-) Would you like me to continue? Would that count as volunteering for InIn and being passionate about it? :-D
You can be very pleasing indeed when you aim for it ;-)
You pay people to retweet, upvote, like, etc. InIn’s posts.
We pay several people to do social media management of InIn’s accounts :-) This is highly different from buying likes themselves. See my response to jkaufman here.
I’m not sure that’s terribly compelling evidence of anything. A post like yours is an applause light for that crowd.
Anyway, I think my main beef is the article trying to push this as “romantic”. Typical mind fallacy is a thing, so maybe it’s just different strokes, but I’ve never met a woman who would find this even marginally romantic, by any definition I’m aware of.
As for the general idea of eschewing gift exchanges in favor of donations: Love it. It just seems your trying too hard to pretend it’s specifically “romantic”, and that feels weird to me.
I’ll have to introduce you to my wife next time you’re in Columbus, OH :-)
Audience matters? The TLYCS blog is very different from LW.
No doubt the audience is different. I was responding to the point about people tuning it out because it’s pushing rationality in extreme ways and thus people thinking it’s super-weird.