I’ve had a nagging feeling in the past that the rationalist community isn’t careful enough about the incentive problems and conflicts of interest that arise when transferring reasonably large sums of money (despite being very careful about incentive landscapes in other ways—e.g. setting the incentives right for people to post, comment, etc, on LW—and also being fairly scrupulous in general). Most of the other examples I’ve seen have been kinda small-scale and so I haven’t really poked at them, but this proposal seems like it pretty clearly sets up terrible incentives, and is also hard to distinguish from nepotism. I think most people in other communities have gut-level deontological instincts about money which help protect them against these problems (e.g. I take Celarix to be expressing this sort of sentiment upthread), which rationalists are more likely to lack or override—and although I think those people get a lot wrong about money too, cases like these sure seems like a good place to apply Chesterton’s fence.
I’ve had a nagging feeling in the past that the rationalist community isn’t careful enough about the incentive problems and conflicts of interest that arise when transferring reasonably large sums of money (despite being very careful about incentive landscapes in other ways—e.g. setting the incentives right for people to post, comment, etc, on LW—and also being fairly scrupulous in general). Most of the other examples I’ve seen have been kinda small-scale and so I haven’t really poked at them, but this proposal seems like it pretty clearly sets up terrible incentives, and is also hard to distinguish from nepotism. I think most people in other communities have gut-level deontological instincts about money which help protect them against these problems (e.g. I take Celarix to be expressing this sort of sentiment upthread), which rationalists are more likely to lack or override—and although I think those people get a lot wrong about money too, cases like these sure seems like a good place to apply Chesterton’s fence.