I'll buy that for a fiver.

[denny]

"I will pay £5 towards the campaign to put an atheist advert on the side of a London bus but only if 4,678 other people anywhere will do the same."

http://www.en-gb.pledgebank.com/atheistbus

"There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and get on with your life."

Comments

[babysimon]

I don't understand how this is supposed to work. If 4679 random people from the internet sign up, then the organisers of the pledge have to contact each of them and get them to send in a fiver? In a timely manner? How?

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

No idea. I assume they've given it some small amount of thought. At worst, nothing happens, and I wasted 30 seconds of my morning.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Looking at the pledge site again, it does say they give your email address to the pledge organiser.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

According to the Pledgebank's 'about' page:
How can you be sure people will bother to carry out the pledge?
We can't; PledgeBank is based on a psychological bet. We believe that if a person possesses a slight desire to do something, and then we help connect them to a bunch of people who also want to do the same thing, then that first person is much more likely to act. We have some success stories for a variety of pledges from the site, and we have also surveyed many of the money-based pledges that have succeeded, and found that payment rates vary from 50% to well over 150%, with three-quarters of people paying being typical.

So presumably it does work in a lot of cases. The site tells you if a pledge you've signed up to has reached its target, and the pledge creator can contact pledgers through the site to tell them how to pay.

[babysimon]

Huh.

Obviously I'm too cynical ;)

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

I originally misread 'atheist' as 'apathist', and thought ~Will any of them actually be bothered to do this?~ :-p

I'd like to slightly alter their advert to be:

"There's probably no God. Now stop worrying or fighting about it and get on with your life."