What about getting money involved? Even relatively small amounts can still confer prestige better than an additional tag or homepage section. It seems like rigorous well-researched posts like this are valuable enough that crowdfunding or someone like OpenPhil or CFAR could sponsor a best-post prize to be awarded monthly. If that goes well you could add incentives for peer-review.
What makes this situation unusual is that being acknowledged by famous computer scientist Donald Knuth to have contributed something useful to one of his works is inherently prestigious; the check is evidence of that reward, not itself the reward. (Note that many of the checks do not even get cashed! A trophy showing that you fixed a bug in Knuth’s code is vastly more valuable than enough money to buy a plain slice of pizza.)
In contrast, Less Wrong is not prestigious. No one will be impressed to hear that you wrote a Less Wrong post. How likely do you think it is that someone who is paid some money for a well-researched LW post will, instead of claiming said money, frame the check and display it proudly?
I think you’re viewing intrinsic versus extrinsic reward as dichotomous rather than continuous. Knuth awards are on one end of the spectrum, salaries at large organizations are at the other. Prestige isn’t binary, and there is a clear interaction between prestige and standards—raising standards can itself increase prestige, which will itself make the monetary rewards more prestigious.
Sure, but we can close the global prestige gap to some extent, and in the mean time, we can leverage in-group social prestige, as the current format implicitly does.
What about getting money involved? Even relatively small amounts can still confer prestige better than an additional tag or homepage section. It seems like rigorous well-researched posts like this are valuable enough that crowdfunding or someone like OpenPhil or CFAR could sponsor a best-post prize to be awarded monthly. If that goes well you could add incentives for peer-review.
Money might do the opposite. “I did all this work and all I got was… several dollars and cents”.
A small amount of money would do the opposite of conferring prestige; it would make the activity less prestigious than it is now.
My impression is that money can only lower prestige if the amount is low relative to an anchor.
For example a $3000 prize would be high prestige if it’s interpreted as an award, but low prestige if it’s interpreted as a salary.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check
What makes this situation unusual is that being acknowledged by famous computer scientist Donald Knuth to have contributed something useful to one of his works is inherently prestigious; the check is evidence of that reward, not itself the reward. (Note that many of the checks do not even get cashed! A trophy showing that you fixed a bug in Knuth’s code is vastly more valuable than enough money to buy a plain slice of pizza.)
In contrast, Less Wrong is not prestigious. No one will be impressed to hear that you wrote a Less Wrong post. How likely do you think it is that someone who is paid some money for a well-researched LW post will, instead of claiming said money, frame the check and display it proudly?
I think you’re viewing intrinsic versus extrinsic reward as dichotomous rather than continuous. Knuth awards are on one end of the spectrum, salaries at large organizations are at the other. Prestige isn’t binary, and there is a clear interaction between prestige and standards—raising standards can itself increase prestige, which will itself make the monetary rewards more prestigious.
I don’t see where Said’s comment implies a dichotomous view of prestige. He simply believes the gap between LessWrong and Donald Knuth is very large.
Sure, but we can close the global prestige gap to some extent, and in the mean time, we can leverage in-group social prestige, as the current format implicitly does.