How easy is this to do? Why can’t we (if we don’t) do this every year for all the things like olympiad (ie math comps, debate, ect)? I might be interested in helping out or getting others to if it seems sufficiently low cost!
I would expect the difficult part to be getting contacts to the winners. There is only one source you can get them from, if for whatever reason they say “no”, is there a Plan B?
On a second thought, the organizers of math olympiad probably do not even have contacts to individual competitors. They probably communicate through schools.
Yep. Could be good to give olympiad organizers a bunch of books to give to the winners directly (but then you don’t get their contact details and can’t send them more stuff later).
A potentially much better approach could be to get the people the target audience respect to promote your thing: can people think of YouTube channels, blogs, twitter accounts, etc. who like or would like HPMOR (or IABIED?) and would share with their subscribers that if they won one of [olympiad list], they can get this awesome book.
In our case, we’ve never asked organizers for contacts of competitors; we’ve been very lucky with how much of a cultural fit HPMOR is to some slice of Russians, the influential people who gave endorsements for HPMOR, and the audience that we’ve been able to reach via sympathetic people.
The HPMOR crowdfunding campaign became the most funded crowdfunding campaign[1] in the history of Russia, and hundreds of thousands of people started reading HPMOR as a result of it. We’ve said that we’ll give copies to winners of olympiads, this message was amplified by many sympathetic media / communities, and then those winners of olympiads gave us their contacts when filling out a form to receive the books.
Optics-wise, we were also lucky with how straightforward everything about the offer was, and that it was understandable to people why we want to send them the books and why the books are awesome.
IMO a pretty insane number is that around 2019-2020, over 80% of participants of the final stage of the national olympiad in Russian language have read HPMOR[2], even though they were not among the people we decided to send books to. (The fraction has been lower among math/cs/physics students, and has been getting lower over the years.)
I think I was very lucky in some ways, and I’m not sure how easy it would be to replicate elsewhere (low-effort tldr in another comment and stats). I think it is certainly possible, and I would be excited about people doing that.
I’d also be very happy if someone took over what I’m doing with books in Russia, because while I think it is impactful (mostly via us getting a pause → these people doing useful technical safety research and contributing to solving the alignment problem), it does consume time that I’d rather spend on more important things (such as increasing the chance of a successful pause).
How easy is this to do? Why can’t we (if we don’t) do this every year for all the things like olympiad (ie math comps, debate, ect)? I might be interested in helping out or getting others to if it seems sufficiently low cost!
I would expect the difficult part to be getting contacts to the winners. There is only one source you can get them from, if for whatever reason they say “no”, is there a Plan B?
On a second thought, the organizers of math olympiad probably do not even have contacts to individual competitors. They probably communicate through schools.
Yep. Could be good to give olympiad organizers a bunch of books to give to the winners directly (but then you don’t get their contact details and can’t send them more stuff later).
A potentially much better approach could be to get the people the target audience respect to promote your thing: can people think of YouTube channels, blogs, twitter accounts, etc. who like or would like HPMOR (or IABIED?) and would share with their subscribers that if they won one of [olympiad list], they can get this awesome book.
In our case, we’ve never asked organizers for contacts of competitors; we’ve been very lucky with how much of a cultural fit HPMOR is to some slice of Russians, the influential people who gave endorsements for HPMOR, and the audience that we’ve been able to reach via sympathetic people.
The HPMOR crowdfunding campaign became the most funded crowdfunding campaign[1] in the history of Russia, and hundreds of thousands of people started reading HPMOR as a result of it. We’ve said that we’ll give copies to winners of olympiads, this message was amplified by many sympathetic media / communities, and then those winners of olympiads gave us their contacts when filling out a form to receive the books.
Optics-wise, we were also lucky with how straightforward everything about the offer was, and that it was understandable to people why we want to send them the books and why the books are awesome.
IMO a pretty insane number is that around 2019-2020, over 80% of participants of the final stage of the national olympiad in Russian language have read HPMOR[2], even though they were not among the people we decided to send books to. (The fraction has been lower among math/cs/physics students, and has been getting lower over the years.)
Among Kickstarter-like crowdfunding campaigns. Navalny’s Moscow mayoral campaign received more donations.
According to the estimates the competitors shared with us
I think I was very lucky in some ways, and I’m not sure how easy it would be to replicate elsewhere (low-effort tldr in another comment and stats). I think it is certainly possible, and I would be excited about people doing that.
I’d also be very happy if someone took over what I’m doing with books in Russia, because while I think it is impactful (mostly via us getting a pause → these people doing useful technical safety research and contributing to solving the alignment problem), it does consume time that I’d rather spend on more important things (such as increasing the chance of a successful pause).