$250k books sold, to save lives | Hacker News Reader

$250k books sold, to save lives

sive.rs

114 pointsgregalbritton52 comments

Derek is one of the kindest people I’ve gotten to know. I reached out to him when I was 17 years old, about to embark on a hacker’s adventure. He took the time to respond, and his advice was always a breeze of encouragement.

I recently read both his books. Hell yeah or no I imagined I would love...and was right...but boy was I surprised by your music and people. It’s a book about friendship and authenticity, disguised as a branding book for musicians.

I posit his ideas will stand the test of time. Highly suggest reading :) — and darn happy that the orders went to help those in need

1. He made $250K self publishing a book. That itself is worth writing a post about and such posts are routinely popular on HN.

2. From all appearances, he gave the money away out of generosity rather than the need for recognition. Didn't strike me as celebrity self aggrandizement.

3. He felt both the what and the how are worth publicizing. He's a known 'thought leader' after all.

Of the three, only the third is remotely objectionable. I think it's ok to say good things about oneself doing good things.

I bet it's correlated with generosity and more likely to be so than the mean spiritedness that comes from wagging a finger at those who are putting themselves out there.

Interesting. This baselines the cost of one life to $2000 effectively. So I could trade two lives for a top of the line Macbook Pro. Buy an SF home for 500 lives. I spend one human life to live in SF every month. Huh.

I get your point, but don't be too down on yourself. Nobody is running around the Against Malaria Foundation saying "quick, buy 125,000 more nets!". Rather, they take in money, and they assign something tangible (in this case, a net that's extrapolated to a life) to each donation so it feels a bit more connected.

This isn't to even remotely take away from what Derek did – I've been a fan for years, and this was one of the coolest blog posts I've read in a long time. It's the opposite... I just don't want anyone to feel like they're killing someone every time they pay rent.

I suppose buying life-saving gear and similar spending is only a medium-sized fraction of the foundation's spending. I wonder what the accurate expected value of lives saved per dollar donated is.

You can see the spreadsheet model GiveWell used to come up with their "dollars per life saved" number here. See the "Bednets" tab for the AMF calculation. With regard to how the foundation spends its money, the only input considered is "dollars donated per anti-malarial bed net distributed" (about five bucks, depending on country), and work proceeds from there to establish the value of one bed net distribution.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zLmPuddUmKsy3v55AfG_...

Oh no, not to worry. Thanks for your concern, though. It is very kind.

Perhaps undeserved, though. The real realization is that even knowing this, I will not change my actions, i.e. it isn't ignorance. The practice of what I do is that I value an arbitrary human life pretty lowly.

I think if you gave me a live feed of a child dying, I would certainly pay the $5k to stop the child from dying, or the $10k, or the whatever. But even the slightest distance and I wouldn't send $20 over. Odd. I can even visualize the child and it feels a bit bad but I'll still take the super burrito.

Personally I have a hard time giving an arbitrary sum, but setting up an automated donation each month that I can forget worked for me, it helps remove the decision aspect.

If you're interested, you should read GiveWell's detailed analysis of why it's reasonable to believe this (i.e. the efficacy of the charity to date, whether additional money will be spent with similar efficacy, etc.) and really form an opinion for yourself about whether it's true. Then, act on that opinion.

https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf

You might also want to read this meta-discussion by GiveWell on such analyses:

https://blog.givewell.org/2011/08/18/why-we-cant-take-expect...

Very cool. Thank you for that. I quite enjoy considering these.

Interestingly, offering myself a choice between an arbitrary human life and a nice meal, I find myself choosing the meal. So I value the arbitrary human life at under a hundred dollars.

Just curious to me. I would have expected to have picked a higher valuation.

The notion of "Dead Child Currency" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6cRhG6PKeASdNHqxD/dead-child...) may intrigue you.

I enjoyed that. Interesting to me that I value arbitrarily children so low. Getting my turbocharged engine vs. getting the same car without a turbo could have saved a couple of lives. I suspect I would have made the same choice and killed two kids for a turbo if I had thought explicitly in those terms then.

Kind of puts the trolley problem in a new perspective -- forget about saving five people or only one, it's more about whether or not you'd save five people or buy that long-range upgrade for your Tesla.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

The original "Dead Child Currency" (also linked from what you posted)

https://www.gwern.net/docs/philo/2011-yvain-deadchild.html

I think it's a classic!

> I spend one human life to live in SF every month

If the numbers are to be believed, the comparison would be more like one human life for every coffee you buy(<$4 to save a human life).

I didn't find this exact page particularly interesting, but I enjoyed exploring the website. It's a good example of a personal website.

Thank you for doing this. I once knew a guy who said it should be your goal to give over a third of your lifetime earnings to charity (I think it was a third, somewhere between 10% and 50%) and this reminded me instantly of that. Great to read about something super positive in these times.

I see that on the pages about each of his books, all of the chapters are listed. Are those actually the complete chapters or only excerpts?

They are the full chapters.

$250k is the revenue? if he wired the whole thing, who covered the costs?

Based on https://sive.rs/m and https://sive.rs/n he's self-publishing electronically for $15 (or $4 more for paperback), so I guess the costs are quite small.

> I made 5000 limited edition hardcover copies of each, but those have sold out now.

Is this not part of the 250?

I guess, so maybe it's >250K profit?

My guess is that he's trying to see if he can do bookbaby.com

edit: wow that actually exists haha

Sounds like Derek Sivers did. Wouldn't be his first time giving to charity.

He has a blog post on the site about the approach he took.

Instead of going to Penguin to get his book published, he decided to try doing the whole process himself. That included getting translations done, coordinating printing, building a webstore, etc.

It's pretty cool tbh

This is very true, in his about me page, he says that he does not rely on any type of cloud and hosts through his own servers. A very unique approach indeed.

Should have donated to the Clinton Foundation. They do great work.

Trolling HN will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you dang

Charity is to be considered charity when nobody gets to know about it.

Broadcasting it to the entire world charity to show the world how generous or or good one is, is uncharitable. This is just someone getting ego trip after spending 250k that they did not need.

The lives get saved regardless. If writing a blog post makes you more likely to save an estimated 120 lives, you write the damn blog post.

A society in which status seeking individuals are incentivized to publically save lives with their money is a healthy society.

None of us are that impressive in the shadows. We're all a little performative, at our core.

May as well use our instinct for performance for good.

While the act of charity isn't as pure if theres a huge amount of publicity surrounding it, it doesn't mean that it isn't charity.

Also, it doesn't hurt to have some pride when you do good things.

There is nothing wrong with effective charity. The problems start when you're merely creating the appearance of doing something by e.g. doing poverty tourism. Celebrities go to some random poor African town where they take some selfies to make them look sympathetic. They get their twitter likes and followers and then the topic is over for them.

Even the celebs are paying the "tour guides", what they've created is an industry where people pretend to be poor to make a living.

The problem is it's easy to get good publicity even when things get worse instead of getting better.

Why?

What’s wrong with someone doing good and taking credit?

Heck, what’s wrong with them doing good solely for the credit? As long as doing good is the side effect, good is done

Is it because you don’t enjoy it as much, knowing who did it? Bit selfish. Or maybe it makes your own anonymous charitable works (or lack thereof) feel not as good? It’s a lot of money but this isn’t a race!

This is assuming that the motive to post this was to gain publicity......

The assumption, even narrower, is that this is post is for gaining publicity _only for the author_. Regardless of this goal, seeing this post had made me (and likely many others) more likely to donate to charity

It's a bit sad that you've taken a wonderful, altruistic act and cheapened it by feeling the need to broadcast it on the internet :(

Charitable acts being lessened by others learning about them is possibly the most harmful widespread opinion that exists today.

Your comment makes it less likely that others will broadcast their charitable giving, result in less people being prompted to give, and overall reduce the amount of giving in the world; all for no gain for yourself or anyone else. You want "a bit sad"? Dwell on that for a while.

There's a "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode where Larry David's character donates to a museum with his name on the donation. There's no self deception for him; he wants to do something good AND he wants the credit. And that's totally fine! The character is self aware enough to know that part of his motivation is selfish.

My point is that by not acknowledging the selfish part of "wanting the credit", the author comes off as not self aware [or disingenuous, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt]. That's what I meant by cheapening it for them.

You sound like an idealist. You expect people to do good without getting anything out of it. The fact that they seek recognition reduces the value of their gesture in your eyes.

If the good is done and lives are improved, does it matter is someone felt good about their act?

Re: "cheapening", who exactly is ranking the charitable act and why does their perspective matter? I was raised with that ideology but eventually abandoned it.

Nowadays, I care a lot more that something helpful is done that the signaling attempt to admit our desire for recognition or hide our involvement in the good deed because that mindset prevents a lot of helpful giving in my experience.

People broadcast what they ate for breakfast! Doing the same when you have donated (any amount of money) doesn’t lessen it in any way.

It lessens it for the author because they're looking for validation from someone in some type of way, the same way the breakfast people do. If you're content being someone that needs validation from other people for your actions, then sure, it doesn't lessen it for them.

I'm not sure if you have to "need" validation to want it. I think the author deserves every bit of ego boost they get from posting this

> cheapened it

I don't follow. Does broadcasting this on the internet reduce the number of lives saved? The point of altruism to save lives, so as long as those are maximized, I don't see any "cheapening" happening.

The point of altruism when you broadcast is to feel good yourself.

The number of lives saved remains the same whether you broadcast it or not.

So, what's the point in broadcasting?

Very true, as St. Matthew has written

"But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing"

A lot of charity is not for the sake of helping someone, but for the sake of making oneself to look noble, get publicity, or earn money (like those "buy X, then we will donate Y" promos).

Personally I don't have such bad feelings about that, as it is a win-win situation very often - those who need get something eventually. I can tolerate a little bit of hypocrisy in that case.

From a religious perspective, that verse would have merit.

From a purely utilitarian perspective, it make no difference. If it encourages others to follow suit, its a net bonus if anything.

Others are convinced to follow on your footsteps.

The reason I started giving to AMF was because a friend of mine posted about their giving to AMF. I would have been less likely to do so if I hadn't seen that post, so broadcasting probably led to more lives saved. Another friend of mine said he was also motivated to give by seeing the very same post.

Anyway, I didn't claim that broadcasting is positive, or has a point. I simply responded to the claim that broadcasting "cheapens" altruism.

I bought two of the limited-edition hardback books -- one for myself, and one to gift a friend. I'm very happy that Derek informed me that the proceeds are being donated to charity. Heck, I probably would've purchased more as gifts had I known about his plans ahead of time.

Maybe he had other reasons to post? Maybe it attracts people toward him that think similarly? Maybe it’s to showcase his thought process on how he likes to maximize his contributions or his thought processes in general? Maybe it’s to make his customers even more happy that the money went to a good cause? Maybe it’s to popularize his way of thinking about money and gratitude? Solely feeling the need to broadcast to the Internet is a tough assumption to pin on Derek. Assuming other people’s motives may say more about the one assuming.

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