This question has a weird implication of mutuality. What I think you mean to ask is “should some LW members support other LW members financially?”.
My answer is “yes, if the donors think that’s a good use of their financial resources.”
Related questions you didn’t ask, but should have:
Should LW support or encourage individuals to ask for or provide financial support? No.
Should LW members ask for such support in DMs to other members? No.
Should LW members post their circumstances in hope for financial support? No.
Should LW be in any way involved in financial transfers between members? No.
After reading your followup, I have a few other rephrasings to propose:
Is LW a good place to ask for money for my services or software? No. For registered or generally recognized charities, some amount of solicitation is tolerated, especially as a side-note to a relevant post.
Does anyone on LW want to sponsor my project? Probably not, but maybe. If your project is rationality-related, describing it and the benefits to the community of it’s existence is just fine. If you mention that you’re seeking sponsorship, you might get someone interested in collaborating or donating. You may well get valuable feedback, even without funding. Note that if this is transparently a plea for bucks, you’ll get downvoted out of existence.
Is LW better than Kickstarter or Patreon as a way to fund my hobby or startup? No.
Should I really think about my business model (or lifestyle income model) if this avenue of revenue is important to me? Yes.
It would help to be more specific about what you mean. There are many different kinds of financial support and there are different things you could mean with “should”.
Both CFAR and MIRI get supported by donations that partly come from LW members.
My question was really stupid, actually I was thinking “I would like to spend at least 200 hours on this project, but it seems I won’t get any money from it, maybe I could ask LW members if they want to support it financially”. A better question is “Can I ask you money to help me to build a software that may help you?”, or “it is inappropriate to ask for money on LW, the platform discourages this”.
Disclaimer: I am still not sure if this is the correct question. Anyway, I am developing some helper tools, and although I won’t monetize them directly, it would be good to get some money from it, because I am not the guy who has enough money to not need any money from the community anymore.
Fundraising requests have been in the past posted on LessWrong: Berkeley REACH would be one example, the Grants & Fundraising Opportunities tag has plenty of other examples. If you want to ask for money I would recommend that you read through a bunch of the existing fundraising posts. They will likely both show you how to format a request and what kind of projects this community values.
In general you will likely come to the conclusion that while people are willing to fund promising projects, it needs more then just “helping a fellow community member” but a belief that the project is good value for money compared to other donation targets. And most people who donate significant amounts of money do it through an EA lense.
Sometimes non needy people want to help other people in need. If you were looking to maximize happiness points across the world, for example, you would gain more points helping those members in need.
Considering that LW readers are mostly rich Americans
There are non-zero members suffering financially, that’s why I asked that. It would be too easy for some people here to make this number go to zero.
I don’t think so. For example, follow these instructions:
Say you are a poor guy on a poor country
Say you luckily got a computer when you were a child
Say while you were studying AI, you found LW.
Say bad events happen to you/your family, and now you are in urgent need.
Now you can see, although most LW readers are not like this guy, this guy is among LW readers. My point is that we should financially support this guy, independently if he belongs to LW or not. I would say it is easy to help him and we have a reason to support him, and the fact he reads LW doesn’t change the facts on his life. Again, although not common, we should be prepared to detect and solve this kind of unfortunate situation. At least this is something I would do if I had enough resources to help.
My point is that we should financially support this guy, independently if he belongs to LW or not. I would say it is easy to help him and we have a reason to support him, and the fact he reads LW doesn’t change the facts on his life.
There’s plenty of EA thought about how to donate to help the global poor. The question here is about whether you believe that the donation to one individual is more or less impactful then a donation to a GiveWell recommended charity.
Should LW members support each other financially?
This question has a weird implication of mutuality. What I think you mean to ask is “should some LW members support other LW members financially?”.
My answer is “yes, if the donors think that’s a good use of their financial resources.”
Related questions you didn’t ask, but should have:
Should LW support or encourage individuals to ask for or provide financial support? No.
Should LW members ask for such support in DMs to other members? No.
Should LW members post their circumstances in hope for financial support? No.
Should LW be in any way involved in financial transfers between members? No.
After reading your followup, I have a few other rephrasings to propose:
Is LW a good place to ask for money for my services or software? No. For registered or generally recognized charities, some amount of solicitation is tolerated, especially as a side-note to a relevant post.
Does anyone on LW want to sponsor my project? Probably not, but maybe. If your project is rationality-related, describing it and the benefits to the community of it’s existence is just fine. If you mention that you’re seeking sponsorship, you might get someone interested in collaborating or donating. You may well get valuable feedback, even without funding. Note that if this is transparently a plea for bucks, you’ll get downvoted out of existence.
Is LW better than Kickstarter or Patreon as a way to fund my hobby or startup? No.
Should I really think about my business model (or lifestyle income model) if this avenue of revenue is important to me? Yes.
It would help to be more specific about what you mean. There are many different kinds of financial support and there are different things you could mean with “should”.
Both CFAR and MIRI get supported by donations that partly come from LW members.
My question was really stupid, actually I was thinking “I would like to spend at least 200 hours on this project, but it seems I won’t get any money from it, maybe I could ask LW members if they want to support it financially”.
A better question is “Can I ask you money to help me to build a software that may help you?”, or “it is inappropriate to ask for money on LW, the platform discourages this”.
Disclaimer: I am still not sure if this is the correct question. Anyway, I am developing some helper tools, and although I won’t monetize them directly, it would be good to get some money from it, because I am not the guy who has enough money to not need any money from the community anymore.
Fundraising requests have been in the past posted on LessWrong: Berkeley REACH would be one example, the Grants & Fundraising Opportunities tag has plenty of other examples. If you want to ask for money I would recommend that you read through a bunch of the existing fundraising posts. They will likely both show you how to format a request and what kind of projects this community values.
In general you will likely come to the conclusion that while people are willing to fund promising projects, it needs more then just “helping a fellow community member” but a belief that the project is good value for money compared to other donation targets. And most people who donate significant amounts of money do it through an EA lense.
Why would they? Considering that LW readers are mostly rich Americans, they don’t seem particularly needy.
Sometimes non needy people want to help other people in need. If you were looking to maximize happiness points across the world, for example, you would gain more points helping those members in need.
There are non-zero members suffering financially, that’s why I asked that. It would be too easy for some people here to make this number go to zero.
>If you were looking to maximize happiness points across the world, for example, you would gain more points helping those members in need.
Wouldn’t that only be true if we thought LW readers are the most needy across the world, or perhaps most easily helped?
I don’t think so. For example, follow these instructions:
Say you are a poor guy on a poor country
Say you luckily got a computer when you were a child
Say while you were studying AI, you found LW.
Say bad events happen to you/your family, and now you are in urgent need.
Now you can see, although most LW readers are not like this guy, this guy is among LW readers. My point is that we should financially support this guy, independently if he belongs to LW or not. I would say it is easy to help him and we have a reason to support him, and the fact he reads LW doesn’t change the facts on his life. Again, although not common, we should be prepared to detect and solve this kind of unfortunate situation. At least this is something I would do if I had enough resources to help.
There’s plenty of EA thought about how to donate to help the global poor. The question here is about whether you believe that the donation to one individual is more or less impactful then a donation to a GiveWell recommended charity.