Please support this blog (with money)

Short version

It has always felt like a gift that people read things I write, and I enjoyed reciprocating that by sharing my writing for free. Until recently I had enough income to pull that off and still cover material needs. That is no longer true, and while it is not an urgent problem, I would like to solve it while that is still true. However it’s important to me to keep this blog free. To square this, I’m asking for your support. If you value this blog and can comfortably do so, please consider sending some of that value back my way via Patreon or Paypal.

Long version

I love my work and this blog. Clients paying me to learn interesting things that they immediately use to help people would be amazing on its own, but then grantmakers pay me to do more speculative EV projects of my choosing. Then I get to publish my work and help more people. I’m incredibly fortunate to do this, and at a wage that supports a good lifestyle in a reasonable number of hours.

Unfortunately, I can’t work a reasonable number of hours. It’s been years since I could work a full work-week, but until recently I could still work enough. That stopped being true this winter (short version: furniture grew mold leading to a devastating health cascade). I spent months barely able to work while firehosing money at the medical system (ballpark total cost: $100,000, plus an intense desire to own my own home). I’m doing much better although not fully healed now and God willing this was a one time thing, but 10 years ago I needed a year off work for dental surgery, and I’ll consider myself lucky if it takes 10 years before my next “one off” multi-month health problem. My limited hours in good times aren’t enough to make up for the total absence of hours in bad times. Disability insurance refused to sell to me at any price back when I had an excellent work attendance record and very minor medical issues, so I assume they’d use a flamethrower if I tried now. This has me interested in finding ways to decouple my income from my working hours.

The obvious thing to do is monetize this blog. Except I hate gating zero-marginal-cost content, especially health content. It keeps out the people who most need the help. It’s also hard to match price to value – any given post could be a waste of your time or a life changing intervention, and you may not know which for years. So I don’t want to do any kind of paywall. Instead, I’m asking for voluntary contributions, based on your evaluation of the value my work has provided you. That way you can match price to value, no one gets locked out of content they need, and I can invest in this blog while staying financially secure.

How to give me money

If you’d like to make a one-time payment, you can paypal me at acesounderglass@gmail.com. This will get me caught up on this winter’s lost income and medical expenses. If your generosity exceeds Paypal’s petty limitations or you just prefer a different format, email me at that same address and we’ll work something out.

If you would like to give ongoing support, you can join my Patreon. This will let me spend more time on my top-choice project and invest more in this blog on an ongoing basis. I’ve recently added real rewards to my patreon, including a discord, live calls for each post, and for the most discerning of patrons, all the plankton you can eat. For the moment these are experimental, and you can help me out by telling me what you’d like to see.

If you’re already a Patreon patron – first of all, thank you. Second, take a look at the new tiers. I’m not allowed to switch you to reward tiers even if you’re already giving enough to qualify for them, and the $1 tier has been removed.

If you would like to give one-time support to specific projects: watch this space. Once my current projects wrap up, I plan on putting some projects on Manifund, which is nonprofit Kickstarter with an impact certificate market attached.

Current and Potential Projects

If you’re providing forward-looking money, you might care about what kinds of things that money will go towards. I don’t want to make promises, but this list should give you some idea of what I am working on now and might do in the near future:

I have at least one more investigation (salt water gargle) in my series on interventions for upper respiratory infection.
I am investigating the development of mathematical and scientific paradigms. Right now the nominal focus is a case study of chaos theory, but the current winds are blowing it towards something more like “when science became uncertain”.
- In my dream world there are lots of follow-ups to this project.
Research on stimulant usage. I originally conceived of this as a lit review, but based on preliminary work I think my frame might be more like “stimulant usage as a learnable skill”.
- The lit review version of this received a grant from Lightspeed Grants, but I redirected it (with permission) to the respiratory infection work. Lightspeed is alas no longer with us so can’t fund the project a second time.
Oops health becomes my full time job again and I have to spend 10 hours/day taking care of myself and another 10 sleeping.
I have at least six drafts in a series on cults and eucults. This never gets to the top of my list because untangling the dependencies is very time consuming.
Every year or two I have a fantastic post on something random. I don’t know what the next Luck Based Medicine or Power Buys You Distance From The Crime is but I’m confident there will be one.
Feedback loops for exercise.
Compare AI-based research tools.
Improve my writing. For the in-the-weeds science-y posts I’d qualify my writing as “fine”. I’d like to do better, but the world is full of things that are more fun or more income generating so it never reaches the top of the list. Patreon would create more incentive and more slack to pursue this.

Counterarguments

Fungibility

One reason you might choose not to contribute is if you think this will funge against money from institutions with deep pockets. I think funging
}will be minimal because:

I asked two grantmakers if this was a risk. Both said the median impact was zero, one put the 99th percentile funging at 20-30%
There may not be grant funding available for me at all. My biggest granter, Lightspeed, no longer exists, and other grantmakers who’ve funded me are not good fits for upcoming projects.
Assuming there was a grantmaker, I don’t think I could talk them into paying me enough to self-fund disability insurance. But I do think I can talk them into viewing small donor support as funding medically-imposed downtime that shouldn’t funge with grants. So however much they’d reduce funding to someone capable of full-time work, I should suffer less than that.

This is only true to a point: at (wild-ass guess) $200k/year off my blog I expect grantmakers (assuming there are any relevant to me) to cease funding anything unless it has significant expenses or can’t be published, and I wouldn’t disagree with that choice.

It’s also only true for back-support and patreon. I expect Manifund-type funding to funge pretty directly, although there’s something matching-like in that the more money I make elsewhere, the more comfortable I feel accepting unaligned grant money.

[I showed this section to one of those grantmakers and he said it “Seems pretty reasonable”, which I interpret as he’s not committing to any particular detail but nothing is so wrong it’s easy to correct]

Low-urgency

I view my health as a giant ball of debt. The payments are steep and will eventually overwhelm my savings, but not today, and not in the next year either. There is time for the king to die, the horse to die, or the horse to learn to talk. I’m asking now because I feel far more comfortable asking for modest payment for value provided than crying for a large bailout after it becomes an emergency. But I don’t want to trick anyone into thinking my situation is desperate before it becomes so.

I mentioned that this experience left me with a burning desire to own my house. I should clarify that the mold problem was (probably) in my furniture, not the walls, and is (probably) fixed now, so I don’t need to move in the immediate future. However I am very tired of moving and landlords and environmental toxin roulette. I dream of living in a place that, should I discover mold, or the heating system is untenable, or the paint chips off when you breathe on the wall, I will have the power to fix it. I’m also so tired of moving.

Why I want this blog to stay free

I meant it when I said having a readership is a gift and paywalling posts changes that relationship in ways I don’t like
I prefer a world when goods with zero sharing cost are freely shared. Mandatory monetization destroys the value from people who would have benefited from a post a little but not enough to justify the price, or for whom a particular post would be immensely valuable but there’s no way to know that ahead of time.
This goes double for goods intended to help vulnerable people, such as those with health issues.
There’s no good way to price blog posts with such range in value. What I really want is a fraction of my shapley value in improving your life, but you that’s impossible to calculate even in retrospect.
I prefer a world where people read a wide variety of things, instead of Substack World where people pay noticeable money to read their 5 favorites and only their 5 favorites.

Conclusion

If you decide to contribute to this blog, thank you. It means a lot to me both symbolically and materially.

If you’re one of my 28 existing patrons, double thanks to you for contributing back when the option was hard to find. I look forward to seeing some of you in the new discord and live calls.