Yeah, but nobody's going to think that if the service is offered for free. Some people might if they charge for it. By charging a certain amount you tell people how much they should value your product.
Yeah, but nobody's going to think that if the service is offered for free.
Yeah, nobody in their right mind would highly value things like Linux or Wikipedia... Or the Sequences, for that matter.
By charging a certain amount you tell people how much they should value your product.
At most you can do some anchoring. You can tell people how much they should value your product and people can (and often do) disagree with that.
In late December 2013, I announced that Vipul Naik and I had launched Cognito Mentoring, an advising service for intellectually curious young people.
Vipul Naik and I are aspiring effective altruists, and we started Cognito with a view toward doing the most good. We've learned a lot over the past 3 months, and are working on planning what to do next. We'd be very grateful for any feedback on current thinking, which I've described below.
Our Mission
Human capital is one of society's most valuable resources, and school years (ages 5 through 22) are a crucial time period for building human capital. Education is a ~$1 trillion dollar sector, but schools are often dysfunctional institutions, and very little effort goes into helping young people develop as much as possible and to allocate their human capital as well as possible. We want to help optimize young people's life trajectories. For the time being, we've chosen to focus on helping highly intellectually capable young people. Some reasons for this are:
Some ways in which we aim to help them improve their life trajectories are:
Demographics
We're primarily targeting high school and college students within the range of intellectual ability of Less Wrongers.
About 75% of respondents to the 2013 Less Wrong Survey who reported SAT scores out of 2400 gave a score of 2130+: this is at the 98th percentile of SAT takers. There are ~40,000 people per grade in that score range in the United States nationwide, so ~320,000 Americans. When one accounts for people at lower percentiles who would benefit, as well as students from other countries, the relevant population is ~1 million.
We're also well equipped to serve people of younger ages who are highly gifted, and are at a developmental stage where they're capable of engaging in metacognition and learning high school and college level material. There are perhaps ~200,000 such people worldwide.
Our activities
At the time when we posted in December 2013, we were thinking of focusing on personalized advising, perhaps with a view toward becoming a franchise. Since then, we've shifted in the direction of focusing on producing written content. There are two reasons for this:
Based on the first point and the size of the target population, if we can produce high quality written content and disseminate it widely, in principle 100k+ people could get a large fraction of the benefit of personalized advising for free.
So far ~70 people have contacted us, including ~40 from Less Wrong (c.f. What we learned about Less Wrong from Cognito Mentoring advising). We corresponded at length with a substantial fraction of them. We've taken the advice that we've generated and converted it into dozens of articles on our advice wiki, at our Quora blog, on Less Wrong and at the Davidson Institute Gifted Issues Discussion Forum. (We'll be consolidating everything into the wiki eventually: the reason that we're posting to multiple forums is for outreach purposes and to get feedback.)
Dissemination
Our front page has been getting ~400 page views per week, and our wiki has been getting ~400 page views a week. Our Quora blog has 27 followers. We would like our visibility to increase by 1000x.
We've struggled to find avenues by which to disseminate our advice. There seem to be few forums where smart high school students congregate. Those forums and mailing lists that do exist often have strict guidelines against posters promoting their own blogs. We're grateful that Less Wrong has been welcoming.
We'd appreciate any suggestions for how we might be able to reach more people.
Where will the social value come from?
The main avenues through which people generate social value and disvalue are
We have to offer our advisees advice that improves their lives for them to find it worthwhile, but we think that our social impact will be mediated primarily through the impacts of #1 and #2 on others.
It may be surprising that we highlight #2. One reason that we highlight it is that high school and college students tend to have free time outside of school, that they can spend more productively on side projects than on the relatively low-skilled part time jobs that are available to them without the credential of a college degree. Another is that it can be hard to find funding to work on something of high social value full time. Some examples of successful side projects created by members of the effective altruist / Less Wrong communities are:
Why don't we expect our impact to be through #3 (donating to charity)?
Concerning #4, the benefits would not be leveraged; concerning #5, one would expect the benefits would be ~1x the benefits to the individual, which isn't a large multiplier; concerning #6, we wouldn't expect to have much impact on people's decision to have children, the sign of the effect would be ambiguous, and our advisees are far from the point of actually raising children.
Here are some examples of channels through which we expect to have a positive impact on #1 and #2:
Finances
We originally thought in terms of supporting the operation by charging for personalized advising. This could still be an option, but:
At this point, we're seeking philanthropic funding, and would appreciate any ideas as to how to secure it.