Has WWOTF sold more copies than the precipice
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resolved Feb 24
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YES

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[Admin] Resolving to YES based on @TigerLavaLamp's analysis.

predicted NO

How are you planning to evaluate this?

bought Ṁ100 of YES

I'm thinking the answer is yes and it's not close. You can view the Amazon Best Seller Ranking on each book's Amazon page, but that updates hourly and favors recent book purchases. However you can use the wayback machine (https://web.archive.org/web/20221001000000*/https://www.amazon.com/What-Owe-Future-William-MacAskill/dp/1541618629) to see what the best seller ranking was at different points in time.

I went through and recorded the values at the different snapshots in this spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ljnBLdTzdmMsmHhM0UktMxjejl1CuAtzRYJlDLEm4C0/edit#gid=0). On 8/22/22, 6 days after release, WWOTF is at #179. The highest I could find for The Precipice is #4375 on 6/24, the day after Toby Ord was on Sam Harris's podcast. A month after release of WWOTF, it's at #2625, A month after The Precipice's release, it was at #18080.

If you believe this calculator (https://www.tckpublishing.com/amazon-book-sales-calculator/), #179 ranking is 457 sales per day and #2625 is 72 per day. In contrast, The Precipice's #4375 is 49 per day, 2 weeks later 7568 is 31 per day, and 2 months later #99024 is 3 per day. These are all just hardcover numbers without including kindle but I'd expect those to be similar.

6/24/2020 is probably close to The Precipice's best day and it probably sold around 50 books? And 6 days after release of WWOTF, it was selling 457 books and was still selling 72 per day 6 weeks later.

bought Ṁ20 of YES

Quick math, 216m google results vs 11m --> seems pretty likely

sold Ṁ20 of YES

... though, WWOTF is doing worse than Precipice on goodreads reviews, and only slightly leading in "added to shelf". I'm revising down

bought Ṁ15 of NO

but also much better (~6k vs ~48k) in terms of Barnes&Noble "Sales Rank". Hmm...