I agree. I’m not even sure if there are hard-to-explain methods for that price.
If you were really going to do it you’d want to figure out a lot more about the details (like where to direct the money to maximize the goodness of the outcome in a way that was intelligible to people, and whether ads of the sort proposed could really generate the predicted amount).
But the numbers you ended up with could be plugged into the text without changing the emotional impact. The pitch is aimed at people’s sense of “making a difference” and “belonging to a community” and “being heard” and so on, not at their excitement for dollar-efficient charity. The stated problem was the difficulty of pressing the right buttons in a compact and readable way that would (hopefully) get viral traction.
The numbers just have to be enough to feel like they matter for the text to be sufficient. The emotional impact of “Half a million...” versus “100 million” is probably not large, even if the real world impact is 200 times less. This is (if I understand correctly) the whole point of the “shut up and multiply” slogan in this community—recognition of our lack of cognitive sensitivity to numerical differences.
But that is part of what I meant about the fact that its really not money “out of nothing”. Watching a single ad costs you something. Equally, a trillion ad impressions is a lot of cost to impose on people’s minds. At some point, the damage to CL and the world might really be worse than the number of lives saved.
It’s not clear to me that the relative impacts could even be worked out in advance… if ads were put up according to the whims of the passionate few, the money ended up in dumb places, there was a backlash and CL’s functioning as an institution people can trust was damaged, and the world economy had X amount of value destroyed thereby, then the whole thing might be a net negative. The damage to CL’s reputation with people who didn’t understand why the ads had suddenly appeared might have to be monitored in real time rather than predicted in advance.
But assuming there was an honestly great thing to be gained that was really blocked by nothing more than a bit of text… well… there was some text to work as the first draft :-)
I agree. I’m not even sure if there are hard-to-explain methods for that price.
If you were really going to do it you’d want to figure out a lot more about the details (like where to direct the money to maximize the goodness of the outcome in a way that was intelligible to people, and whether ads of the sort proposed could really generate the predicted amount).
But the numbers you ended up with could be plugged into the text without changing the emotional impact. The pitch is aimed at people’s sense of “making a difference” and “belonging to a community” and “being heard” and so on, not at their excitement for dollar-efficient charity. The stated problem was the difficulty of pressing the right buttons in a compact and readable way that would (hopefully) get viral traction.
The numbers just have to be enough to feel like they matter for the text to be sufficient. The emotional impact of “Half a million...” versus “100 million” is probably not large, even if the real world impact is 200 times less. This is (if I understand correctly) the whole point of the “shut up and multiply” slogan in this community—recognition of our lack of cognitive sensitivity to numerical differences.
But that is part of what I meant about the fact that its really not money “out of nothing”. Watching a single ad costs you something. Equally, a trillion ad impressions is a lot of cost to impose on people’s minds. At some point, the damage to CL and the world might really be worse than the number of lives saved.
It’s not clear to me that the relative impacts could even be worked out in advance… if ads were put up according to the whims of the passionate few, the money ended up in dumb places, there was a backlash and CL’s functioning as an institution people can trust was damaged, and the world economy had X amount of value destroyed thereby, then the whole thing might be a net negative. The damage to CL’s reputation with people who didn’t understand why the ads had suddenly appeared might have to be monitored in real time rather than predicted in advance.
But assuming there was an honestly great thing to be gained that was really blocked by nothing more than a bit of text… well… there was some text to work as the first draft :-)
Asteroid defence, for one: http://jgmatheny.org/matheny_extinction_risk.htm
Anna Salamon gives an estimate for lives the SIAI can save per dollar in this talk: http://vimeo.com/7397629