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.
Just curious—how are you estimating value here? I’m totally excited for this policy, just wondering how you put a dollar amount on this.
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.