These posts seem ridiculously valuable to me, and also pretty hard to write, so I’d think they’d deserve a pretty large bounty
Overviews of a contemporary research field, i.e. “if you were writing a textbook on the state-of-the-art for subject X, what would the intro chapter look like”
Examples I would like to see: what does technical biosafety research look like? What are the key research directions and challenges in studying C. elegans’s brain?
[disclaimer: I’m planning on writing something on this second topic, so I can’t guarantee my suggestion of a bounty on this is entirely self-disinterested]
Life advice, i.e. “here’s an easy thing you could try that might make your life better”
Lots of examples, but I’m mostly imagining something like Give it a Google
So many people have advice to give that probably it would be better to give a payout only to the top-N best advice posts during the bounty period.
What exactly constitutes life advice? Does any rationality technique count here?
Note also that this runs the risk of flooding LessWrong with billions of advice posts (because these are easy to write)
Probably a bad idea, oops
Another idea is to—instead of putting a bounty on a specific genre of post—offer to generally pay out to the top N posts submitted each week/month, to generally incentivize the creation of high-quality material of any type.
Detailed walkthroughs, i.e. step-by-step instructions on how to do a thing
Fairly niche, but I’ve been toying with the idea of creating one of these next time I do my UK self-assessment tax return (which I need to in the next few months).
offer to generally pay out to the top N posts submitted each week/month
I’d worry about the incentive to wait until the end of the week to post, and delay if the past week seemed unusually high quality. Adding some amount of randomization might help, such that two things posted next to each other have a good chance of falling in different “weeks”.
(Edit: or perhaps more simply, to make N variable, so an unusually high quality week gets more payouts.)
Some genres of thing you might consider offering a bounty on in the future, ordered by how good of an idea I think they are:
Detailed walkthroughs, i.e. step-by-step instructions on how to do a thing
Examples: signing up for cryonics, cultivating shoulder advisors, starting on Zettlekasten, running meetups
These posts seem ridiculously valuable to me, and also pretty hard to write, so I’d think they’d deserve a pretty large bounty
Overviews of a contemporary research field, i.e. “if you were writing a textbook on the state-of-the-art for subject X, what would the intro chapter look like”
Example: state-of-the-art for aging research
Examples I would like to see: what does technical biosafety research look like? What are the key research directions and challenges in studying C. elegans’s brain?
[disclaimer: I’m planning on writing something on this second topic, so I can’t guarantee my suggestion of a bounty on this is entirely self-disinterested]
Life advice, i.e. “here’s an easy thing you could try that might make your life better”
Lots of examples, but I’m mostly imagining something like Give it a Google
So many people have advice to give that probably it would be better to give a payout only to the top-N best advice posts during the bounty period.
What exactly constitutes life advice? Does any rationality technique count here?
Note also that this runs the risk of flooding LessWrong with billions of advice posts (because these are easy to write)
Probably a bad idea, oops
Another idea is to—instead of putting a bounty on a specific genre of post—offer to generally pay out to the top N posts submitted each week/month, to generally incentivize the creation of high-quality material of any type.
Fairly niche, but I’ve been toying with the idea of creating one of these next time I do my UK self-assessment tax return (which I need to in the next few months).
I’d worry about the incentive to wait until the end of the week to post, and delay if the past week seemed unusually high quality. Adding some amount of randomization might help, such that two things posted next to each other have a good chance of falling in different “weeks”.
(Edit: or perhaps more simply, to make N variable, so an unusually high quality week gets more payouts.)