When I entered the Quantified Health contest, I calculated my expected return. I thought it would take me maybe 20-30 hours. I was right. I thought I had a 10% chance of winning $5000, 10% chance of winning $1000, and 50% chance of winning $500. That’s $850 expected return. That’s about $34 an hour to do something that I enjoyed doing, thought was a valuable use of my time, and taught me research skills and nutrition. I had just graduated high school, so that was way more than the wage I would have gotten in any mind-numbing part time I could have gotten in the small town where I was living. So entering was totally worthwhile.
I only won $500, which was an actual return of $20 an hour, but that’s still more than you get flipping burgers.
So I think that there’s nothing wrong with running these contests. People enter them if they think they should, and they’re relatively cheap ways of getting stuff done.
I do think with those numbers make it a fairly reasonable decision to enter, in that instance. A lot of my concern about contest-labor stems from how it affects the art industry, in which returns end up being less than minimum wage.
I don’t know how to expect this to play out over multiple iterations, either.
When I entered the Quantified Health contest, I calculated my expected return. I thought it would take me maybe 20-30 hours. I was right. I thought I had a 10% chance of winning $5000, 10% chance of winning $1000, and 50% chance of winning $500. That’s $850 expected return. That’s about $34 an hour to do something that I enjoyed doing, thought was a valuable use of my time, and taught me research skills and nutrition. I had just graduated high school, so that was way more than the wage I would have gotten in any mind-numbing part time I could have gotten in the small town where I was living. So entering was totally worthwhile.
I only won $500, which was an actual return of $20 an hour, but that’s still more than you get flipping burgers.
So I think that there’s nothing wrong with running these contests. People enter them if they think they should, and they’re relatively cheap ways of getting stuff done.
I do think with those numbers make it a fairly reasonable decision to enter, in that instance. A lot of my concern about contest-labor stems from how it affects the art industry, in which returns end up being less than minimum wage.
I don’t know how to expect this to play out over multiple iterations, either.