Sorry in advance for an entirely too serious comment to a lighthearted post; it made me have thoughts I thought worth sharing. The whole “Karma convertibility” system is funny, but the irony feels slightly off. Society (vague term alert!) does in fact reward popular content with money. Goodhart’s law is not “monetizing an economy instantly crashes it”. My objections to Karma convertibility, are:
Exploitability. Put in enough people on a system, and some of them will try to break it. Put in even more people, and they will likely succeed.
Inefficiency. There is a big upfront cost to generating good ideas. Ie: you’ve got to invest putting interesting things inside your mind before you can make up your own. Specialization pays off just as much in intellectual labor as in other areas.
Pareto’s law. A small, selected group can be a consistent performance outlier.
Marginal returns on money. The marginal value of money goes down dramatically when you get above the subsistence threshold.
I think that providing a salaried position to a small number of intrinsically motivated individuals is a much more efficient way of buying ideas. I think RAND is basically structured this way?
Epistemic status: Don’t quote me on any of this. I’ve done no research, instead I’m pattern-matching from stuff that I’ve passively absorbed.
Sorry in advance for an entirely too serious comment to a lighthearted post; it made me have thoughts I thought worth sharing. The whole “Karma convertibility” system is funny, but the irony feels slightly off. Society (vague term alert!) does in fact reward popular content with money. Goodhart’s law is not “monetizing an economy instantly crashes it”. My objections to Karma convertibility, are:
Exploitability. Put in enough people on a system, and some of them will try to break it. Put in even more people, and they will likely succeed.
Inefficiency. There is a big upfront cost to generating good ideas. Ie: you’ve got to invest putting interesting things inside your mind before you can make up your own. Specialization pays off just as much in intellectual labor as in other areas.
Pareto’s law. A small, selected group can be a consistent performance outlier.
Marginal returns on money. The marginal value of money goes down dramatically when you get above the subsistence threshold.
I think that providing a salaried position to a small number of intrinsically motivated individuals is a much more efficient way of buying ideas. I think RAND is basically structured this way?
Epistemic status: Don’t quote me on any of this. I’ve done no research, instead I’m pattern-matching from stuff that I’ve passively absorbed.