I have to confess, it is a more personal intuition (and willingness to spend altruistic dollars) than a hard calculation. It has to be that way, because at some point I have to assign dollar value to something that isn’t a dollar value.
A piece of it is that I think individuals (and collectively the community) understanding the world a bit better is worth quite a lot. I think that knowledge has compounding gains, so each additional piece that is known gets built upon and multiplied. I think that our community becomes stronger and wise as a result of scholarship. And of course, each good piece of writing strengthens the community, gets more readership, and in turn generates more writing. This is a poor articulation, but it’s what I can manage in a spare couple of minutes.
Another way to think about it is the labor costs. Generating posts is difficult knowledge, the likes of which you’d pay at least $50/hour in the Bay Area. A solidly written post might take between 5 and 20 hours, which means if you were pay someone an hourly wage for the post, the amount that it’d make worth it, in dollars, is like $500. If someone is going to bother writing that post, really there ought to be some “profit” with the post being worth more.
I have to confess, it is a more personal intuition (and willingness to spend altruistic dollars) than a hard calculation. It has to be that way, because at some point I have to assign dollar value to something that isn’t a dollar value.
A piece of it is that I think individuals (and collectively the community) understanding the world a bit better is worth quite a lot. I think that knowledge has compounding gains, so each additional piece that is known gets built upon and multiplied. I think that our community becomes stronger and wise as a result of scholarship. And of course, each good piece of writing strengthens the community, gets more readership, and in turn generates more writing. This is a poor articulation, but it’s what I can manage in a spare couple of minutes.
Another way to think about it is the labor costs. Generating posts is difficult knowledge, the likes of which you’d pay at least $50/hour in the Bay Area. A solidly written post might take between 5 and 20 hours, which means if you were pay someone an hourly wage for the post, the amount that it’d make worth it, in dollars, is like $500. If someone is going to bother writing that post, really there ought to be some “profit” with the post being worth more.