Note there’s a fairly major difference between “paying for arbitrary book reviews” and “paying for specific reviews to get specific questions answered.” We built the questions feature on LW hoping it could be part of an overall bounty system, but what we found is that successfully communicating the question between grantor and researcher was very effortful/complex (often researchers would go off and answer a subtly wrong question). So in practice, what works well is having relationships with specific researchers you trust who are reasonably onboarded into your worldview and understand your assumptions.
Figuring out something in this space to make it more scalable certainly seems really valuable, but I think it’s harder than this post makes it sound.
Note there’s a fairly major difference between “paying for arbitrary book reviews” and “paying for specific reviews to get specific questions answered.” We built the questions feature on LW hoping it could be part of an overall bounty system, but what we found is that successfully communicating the question between grantor and researcher was very effortful/complex (often researchers would go off and answer a subtly wrong question). So in practice, what works well is having relationships with specific researchers you trust who are reasonably onboarded into your worldview and understand your assumptions.
Figuring out something in this space to make it more scalable certainly seems really valuable, but I think it’s harder than this post makes it sound.