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.
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)