I posted a handful of example questions I have been/would be interested in on Raemon’s bounty question. I think these examples address several of the challenges in section 4:
All of them are questions which I’d expect many people on lesswrong to be independently interested in, and which would make great blog-post-material. So the bounties wouldn’t be the sole incentive; even those who don’t get the bounty are likely to derive some value from the exercise.
There’s not really a trust/credentials problem; it would be easy for me to tell whether a given response had been competently executed. If I needed to hire someone in advance of seeing their answer, then there would be a trust problem, but the best-answer-gets-paid format mostly solves that. Even if there are zero competent responses, I’ve bought useful information: I’ve learned that the question is tougher than I thought. Also, they’re all the sort of project that I expect a smart, generally-educated non-expert to be able to execute.
They are all motivated by deeper/vaguer questions, but answers to the questions as stated have enough value to justify themselves. Directly answering the deeper questions would not be the objective of any of them.
They’re all sufficiently clean-cut that I wouldn’t expect much feedback to be necessary mid-effort.
I see that second point as the biggest advantage of bounties over a marketplace: just paying for the best answer means I don’t need to go to the effort of finding someone who’s competent and motivated and so forth. I don’t need to babysit someone while they work on the problem, to make sure we’re always on the same page. I don’t need to establish careful criteria for what counts as “finished”. I can just throw out my question, declare a bounty, and move on. That’s a much lower-effort investment on the asker’s side than a marketplace.
In short, with a bounty system, competition between answerers solves most of the trust problems which would otherwise require lots of pre-screening and detailed contract specifications.
Bounties will also likely need to be higher to compensate for answer-side risk, but that’s a very worthwhile tradeoff for those of us who have some money and don’t want to deal with hiring and contracts and other forms of baby-sitting.
I agree with this argument for bounties over marketplace.
I currently lean the best norm being less “I give the best answer a full bounty” and more “I distribute a fixed amount of money among people who contributed significantly to answering the question”, since I think in many cases part of the work will be refactoring the question in pieces.
Totally on board with that. The important point is eliminating risk-management overhead by (usually) only having to reward someone who contributes value, in hindsight.
I posted a handful of example questions I have been/would be interested in on Raemon’s bounty question. I think these examples address several of the challenges in section 4:
All of them are questions which I’d expect many people on lesswrong to be independently interested in, and which would make great blog-post-material. So the bounties wouldn’t be the sole incentive; even those who don’t get the bounty are likely to derive some value from the exercise.
There’s not really a trust/credentials problem; it would be easy for me to tell whether a given response had been competently executed. If I needed to hire someone in advance of seeing their answer, then there would be a trust problem, but the best-answer-gets-paid format mostly solves that. Even if there are zero competent responses, I’ve bought useful information: I’ve learned that the question is tougher than I thought. Also, they’re all the sort of project that I expect a smart, generally-educated non-expert to be able to execute.
They are all motivated by deeper/vaguer questions, but answers to the questions as stated have enough value to justify themselves. Directly answering the deeper questions would not be the objective of any of them.
They’re all sufficiently clean-cut that I wouldn’t expect much feedback to be necessary mid-effort.
I see that second point as the biggest advantage of bounties over a marketplace: just paying for the best answer means I don’t need to go to the effort of finding someone who’s competent and motivated and so forth. I don’t need to babysit someone while they work on the problem, to make sure we’re always on the same page. I don’t need to establish careful criteria for what counts as “finished”. I can just throw out my question, declare a bounty, and move on. That’s a much lower-effort investment on the asker’s side than a marketplace.
In short, with a bounty system, competition between answerers solves most of the trust problems which would otherwise require lots of pre-screening and detailed contract specifications.
Bounties will also likely need to be higher to compensate for answer-side risk, but that’s a very worthwhile tradeoff for those of us who have some money and don’t want to deal with hiring and contracts and other forms of baby-sitting.
I agree with this argument for bounties over marketplace.
I currently lean the best norm being less “I give the best answer a full bounty” and more “I distribute a fixed amount of money among people who contributed significantly to answering the question”, since I think in many cases part of the work will be refactoring the question in pieces.
Totally on board with that. The important point is eliminating risk-management overhead by (usually) only having to reward someone who contributes value, in hindsight.