I was recently invited to give a talk on heuristics and biases at Jane Street Capital, one of the top proprietary trading firms ("proprietary" = they trade their own money). When I got back home, I realized that (a) I'd successfully managed to work through the trip, and (b) it'd been very pleasant mentally, a nice change of pace. (One of these days I have to blog about what I discovered at Jane Street - it turns out they've got their own rationalist subculture going.)
So I've decided to hang out my shingle as a speaker at financial companies.
You may be thinking: "Perhaps, Eliezer, this is not the best of times."
Well... I do have hopes that, among the firms interested in having me as a speaker, a higher-than-usual percentage will have come out of the crash okay. I checked recently to see if this were the case for Jane Street Capital, and it was.
But more importantly - your competitors are learning the secrets of rationality! Are you?
Or maybe I should frame it as: "Not doing too well this year? Drop the expensive big-name speakers. I can give a fascinating and useful talk and I won't charge you as much."
And just to offer a bit of a carrot - if I can monetize by speaking, I'm much less likely to try charging for access to my future writings. No promises, but something to keep in mind. So do recommend me to your friends as well.
I expect that, as I speak, the marginal value of money to my work will go down; the more I speak, the more my price will go up. If my (future) popular book on rationality becomes a hit, I'll upgrade to big-name fees. And later in my life, if all goes as planned, I'll be just plain not available.
So I'm offering you, my treasured readers, a chance to get me early. I would suggest referencing this page when requesting me as a speaker. Emails will be answered in the order they arrive.
Do you believe that books should not be published?
Is that a serious question, or is it rhetorical? I don't object to publishing, I object to the publishing industry, its orientation, and the treatment of authors. Of course I believe writers' work should be published. In fact, in a lot of cases it is the publishing industry which prevents this - because it is too often a game of politics and capital. Most books don't get published anyway, as I'm sure you know - making this objection a moot point. So really, if you support the publishing industry, I should be asking you this question... Well?
I'm not limiting my arguments domain to book publishing, either.
Writing is only lucrative for a very small minority. Most writers effectively work for free, partly because their work never gets published. And for most of the rest, writing is not a primary source of income - meaning that if they had to live off writing, they would be living in poverty.
Anyway, to really answer this question I would have to get into a discussion about the merits of guaranteed income.
But if you're really curious, and not just trying to draw me into a debate, then I suggest you start by inverting or redirecting all of your questions to the publishing industry itself. And if you want to investigate alternatives, look to the internet - which definitely has the potential to destroy the industry.
And like I said, I'm not limiting my argument to book publishing either. The internet is already destroying newspapers. You realize what we're doing now would have had to go through a newspaper's editorial page some time ago - with some editor picking and choosing which of our opinions to publish, and the obligatory inclusion of his own thoughts on the matter (not that it doesn't happen here, also, as I've heard that comments getting deleted on OB is not as rare as we all think)?
There are also good possibilities for applications to academic journals.
Point being, the industry is a dinosaur. And there are as many reasons for it being evil as there are for perceiving it as ancient - the way writers are treated, its affect on the assimilation/dissemination of information, the way readers are treated, elitism, etc.