-- a deep churning in my stomach -- when I found out what bad decisions I made by giving without very carefully and explicitly guiding them to the better choice; will cause them to instead of:
I would also add: "Neurons that fire together wire together"*. You don't want people to have a deep churning in their stomach they associate with bad decision making when they read their first article telling them about the Against Malaria Foundation.
Most of the marketing these days shows a brandname and then elicits positive emotions. Axe doesn't tell you a rational story of how using axe will make you sexy but their ads just create the emotional link by eliciting the emotions while telling you about the brand.
The hero's journey can start out with the hero facing hardship but it doesn't end with the hero "avoid giving regret". It end with him actually having success and feeling positive emotions. Given the way your article started a good ending would have been to say that you feel now proud to be effective and rescue lives such as the life of Mary. Proudness is one step up from regret and people who resonate with regret want to feel it. Not everybody will resonate with a story going from regret in the stomach to proudness in the stomach but that seems to be the audience you want to reach.
It's also worth noting that attacking an organisation with a budget of $300 million per year comes with risks. When OrphanWilde writes Rule #3: "I will not go around provoking strong, vicious enemies" he does have a point.
*: Excuse me for my neurobubble, but it's the best label for the principle I can think of if I don't use hypnosis terminonlogy.
Good point about the neurons firing together and the hero's journey, will orient toward that approach in the future.
Not sure if Make-A-Wish cares about this sort of thing strongly enough, though, to care about this article. Well, we'll see, I guess :-)
Disclaimer: This post is mainly of interest to EA-oriented Less Wrongers
Happy to share that I got this article promoting effective giving, and especially advocating Against Malaria Foundation, GiveWell, and The Life You Can Save, published in The Huffington Post.
This piece is part of my broader work at Intentional Insights, a nonprofit devoted to promoting effective altruism and rational thinking to a broad audience effectively, by using modern promotion and marketing methods. Our goals with this and similar articles is to channel both money to effective charities and encourage people to think about donations in a rational, science-based, data-driven manner. These articles are also aimed to be a good fit for those supportive of EA ideas to share with others on social media, to help encourage non-EAs to adopt effective giving strategies, since the articles are aimed to be easy to read and engaging.
I'd love your feedback on how well you think this article works in accomplishing the goals outlined above, both strengths and weaknesses, to help me improve my writing and to help Intentional Insights improve its efforts. For those of you who are EA-oriented, would you share this on your social media? Why or why not?
Also, I would value any ideas on how to evaluate the QALYs gained from channeling people's money and thinking toward effective giving, as that's something we at Intentional Insights are trying to figure out. For example, how many QALYs are gained from publishing an article like this in a broad venue such as The Huffington Post? What are good approaches to estimating this number? The best we came up with so far is a first-order intuitive gut reactions of how much would you pay to not have this article and its influence on people disappear, so I'd be curious about your response to this question.
P.S. Note that based on previously-expressed concerns about purity of content and the rationality/Less Wrong brand, we at Intentional Insights have updated and are no longer presenting ourselves publicly as promoting rationality or Less Wrong explicitly, though we are bringing up rationality and Less Wrong to those who have engaged with our content extensively and are guiding them first to ClearerThinking and then to Less Wrong.
P.P.S. I'd be glad to speak to anyone who wants to know more about and collaborate on promoting effective altruism and rationality to a broad audience by using modern promotion and marketing methods, my email is gleb@intentionalinsights.org
Cross-posted on the Intentional Insights blog and the EA Forum.