Something I’d like LessWrong to do better is to allow authors to transition from hobbyists, to professionals that get paid to research and write full time.
Earlier this year, I was thinking about whether LessWrong should become more like substack, where there’s an easy affordance to start supporting financially supporting authors you like. I liked the idea but wasn’t sure it’d be healthy for LessWrong – the sorts of posts that make people excited to donate are often more tribal/political. But this seemed less worrisome during The Review. It’s a time when people are thinking holistically about the LessWrong intellectual world, comparing many different posts against each other and reflecting on which ones were truly valuable.
So, after the Final Vote this year, all posts above some threshold will get a donation button interface, which makes it easier people to just give the author money. I encourage everyone to donate in proportion to how much value you got from a post. If it slightly improved your life, maybe donate $20-$50 as a thank you. If you think a post was a crucial insight for helping the entire world, maybe donate as if it were an effective altruism target. (i.e. if you’re the sort of person who donates 10% of your income, consider if any LessWrong posts are competitive with the other causes you might give to). LessWrong posts are a public good, and I think at least some are worth supporting in this way.
I’m cautiously optimistic about the possibility of LessWrong enabling people to write professionally.
I’m weakly skeptical that Substack-style crowdfunding is the way to go.
I won’t be donating; I use my marginal dollars more altruistically. I think it’s fine for people to donate, of course, but such donations generally don’t make sense to come out of your effective altruism budget, since their counterfactual impact is quite small. If you think incentivizing excellent LessWrong posts is highly effective, then it would be better to publicly promise to donate [that much] to the authors of your favorite posts in 2022. Or if you’re too modest for that, PM me and I’ll publicly announce that an anonymous person has promised to donate [that much] next year. (Of course, donating this year to thank the author is fine unless you’re a fanatical effective altruist — but it’s prima facie not highly effective.)
If you think incentivizing excellent LessWrong posts is highly effective, then it would be better to publicly promise to donate [that much] to the authors of your favorite posts in 2022.
Why is that the case? Is it just that people can’t see how much you’ve donated via donation buttons? I assume that some aggregate donation figures will be made public later on, though, so making those figures higher seems pretty similar to you announcing donations personally.
I’m unsure exactly how much we’ll be making public, but I do expect at least aggregate donations to be public. The entire point here is to not merely have a few people committing to give money, but to build an entire system that helps authors have a justified expectation that important posts generally get money. And among the more credible ways to signal this is going to happen in the future is to start doing it now.
I’m cautiously optimistic about the possibility of LessWrong enabling people to write professionally.
I’m weakly skeptical that Substack-style crowdfunding is the way to go.
I won’t be donating; I use my marginal dollars more altruistically. I think it’s fine for people to donate, of course, but such donations generally don’t make sense to come out of your effective altruism budget, since their counterfactual impact is quite small. If you think incentivizing excellent LessWrong posts is highly effective, then it would be better to publicly promise to donate [that much] to the authors of your favorite posts in 2022. Or if you’re too modest for that, PM me and I’ll publicly announce that an anonymous person has promised to donate [that much] next year. (Of course, donating this year to thank the author is fine unless you’re a fanatical effective altruist — but it’s prima facie not highly effective.)
Why is that the case? Is it just that people can’t see how much you’ve donated via donation buttons? I assume that some aggregate donation figures will be made public later on, though, so making those figures higher seems pretty similar to you announcing donations personally.
Fair, I was implicitly assuming that no donation figures would be public.
I’m unsure exactly how much we’ll be making public, but I do expect at least aggregate donations to be public. The entire point here is to not merely have a few people committing to give money, but to build an entire system that helps authors have a justified expectation that important posts generally get money. And among the more credible ways to signal this is going to happen in the future is to start doing it now.
(I expect to have figured out how public things will be by the time we get to the Final Voting phase)